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Chapter Thirty-Three—Read the Legend

Harry wakes up with a shout, his hand clutching his chest for a second. It feels as though something has ruptured there, as though someone has struck him with a curse—

And then Harry realizes what it is, and laughs a little as he shut his eyes. It went faster than he thought it would. Hermione didn't need the full month after all.

As he drifts slowly back to sleep, he wonders how many pure-bloods all over Britain are waking up right now, and how many of them will dismiss it as a night terror and go back to sleep, and how long it will take them to realize that the bonds that connect them to their house-elves are now irrevocably ruptured.

Hermione will hide the bonds with the Invisibility Cloak. The elves will retain free will, and some of the might choose to stay with the families they've served. Others will negotiate for fair wages, and others will vanish at once, gone in search of family members they've been parted from for too long.

Harry is smiling as sleep claims him again.

"It's front-page news, mate."

Harry grins as he opens the Prophet that Ron hands him. He thought it might take a while for the pure-blood families to report that they have broken bonds to their house-elves now, since it would mean making themselves look weak.

Apparently not. Because one of the freed elves chose to negotiate for wages in the middle of bloody Diagon Alley.

Harry claps his hand across his mouth so he won't spew his porridge back out, and reads eagerly.

…appears that the house-elves that belong to the Selwyn family no longer serve them. The elf, who called himself Elsinny, said that he never understood the concept of wages before, but he does now. "I never bothered to listen," he said, shaking his ears and looking up at this reporter with an expression I can only call regretful. "It was like someone was speaking to me in a different language. But now the bond that let them lie to me is gone. Why should they have my labor and I have nothing?"

Harry whoops under his breath. He perhaps could have asked for a Shafiq or Parkinson house-elf instead of a Selwyn one to make it completely perfect, but this is still great. He hands the paper back to Ron and grins at nothingness for a second.

"Do you think the pure-bloods are going to start petitioning the Ministry to get their elves back?" Ron asks, folding up the paper and sliding it into a stack of paper on the table. Most of those messages are pleas to Harry to reconsider his Dark Lord career or surrender himself or do something else equally idiotic. The Prophet might make the stack a little smarter on the whole, Harry considers.

"They can petition the Ministry all they like. They don't control the elves now." Harry stands up and stretches. It's the first concrete proof of their victory, and he can't sit still right now. "I'm going back to Britain. I know a few places that I can probably spy on some of the Sun Chamber members. Or, hell, if they're gathered in the Chamber itself, then my stole and my magic will still allow me to walk in."

"Be careful, mate."

"I'm going to be entertaining," Harry says, and he winks and steps outside the safehouse before Ron can talk him out of it.

"How am I supposed to function without house-elves?"

There's this little thing called magic, Harry thinks, standing in front of the blazing sun on the wall of the Sun Chamber under his modified Disillusionment Charm. All he had to do was wait until someone else walked through the door, and then he could do it himself without anyone being suspicious.

The Chamber is a scene of chaos. There's hand-wringing and actual breast-beating, which Harry has never seen before and finds amusing as hell. There's moaning and complaining and pure-bloods getting in a duel about who has more of a grudge. Everyone is sure that Harry has a part in it somehow, and poor Honeywell is getting dueling invitation after dueling invitation, because she was the one who sponsored Harry into the Chamber in the first place.

Neville finally stands up and casts a Banging Curse at the ceiling to get everyone's attention. He raises an eyebrow when they turn to stare at him and says, "Is it really that great a hardship to live without house-elves?"

"Of course it is!" Honeywell says back to him, although she seems to be taking it better than some of them have. Harry wonders idly if perhaps she just didn't have all that many house-elves. "We need them to soothe our children to sleep, and take care of chores for us, and go to the shops, and clean up after us, and…"

"In other words," Neville says in a flat tone, "you need them to let you keep being children."

Silence, but only because, Harry thinks, most of the Sun Chamber is trying to figure out how serious Neville is actually being. Honeywell finally says, "Pardon? I assure you that the house-elves let us have time to be adults. They don't—they didn't bother us with the niggling tasks of life that other people can take care of."

"Ah," Neville says, mouth twitching. "My mistake. Then they didn't let you be children. They let you be Muggles."

This time, the screech is immediate. Harry leans back against the wall and does his best not to laugh and lead someone to him. He wants to stay and observe this, not duel half the Sun Chamber because they would mistakenly think he was here to give an invitation.

"What do you mean? How dare you say that?" Lord Burke is on his feet, waving his wand back and forth in Neville's direction. He doesn't look close to casting any spell, which is a good thing, as Harry would hate to decapitate him and get blood all over this nice floor. "We are completely different from Muggles!"

"Not really. You see, Muggles have machines that let them do all sorts of things. Wash clothes and dishes with a minimum of fuss, travel vast distances, clean up messes they make, ensure their carpets are sparkling…you've just treated house-elves like your machines. You would have had to evolve better spells and wandwork long ago if not for them."

"I assure you my wandwork is more than adequate to kill you, Lord Longbottom! I challenge you to a duel!"

"Not a duel, please, not a duel!" Honeywell runs here and there, flapping her hands. "Too many of us are dying as it is!"

"It's all the fault of that Lord Potter and Lord Black nonsense!" Someone whose name Harry never bothered learning, but who looks as if he's related to the Goyles, leaps to his feet to yammer at Honeywell. "If you hadn't sponsored him and told him that he had two Lordships—"

"We were supposed to keep that secret? How?"

"Better to keep that secret from him than to lose the power of keeping our existence secret!"

"And losing our house-elves!"

"We were respected! Lords and Ladies! Now we're a laughingstock in the papers because they say that we can't even counter some Dark Lord who's the son of a Mudblood!"

"And for losing our house-elves!"

"I know that, I know that, Lady Everheart! I am only trying—"

"To lose us our house-elves!"

It's glorious, and it goes on and on. Harry ponders revealing himself for a time, but honestly, he doesn't need to to enjoy himself, or to do what he ultimately came to do. He waits until the chaos is at its height, and even Neville is looking as though he's about to retreat.

Then Harry turns and faces that illusory sun on the walls that they're so proud of, and swings his wand. There's a splutter and a flicker, the way there might be from Muggle lights about to go off because the electricity is failing. Then it goes out.

That gets him even more staring, open-mouthed attention. At last Neville falls on his knees and begins to rend his clothes. (Harry knows for a fact that Hannah made him wear robes he doesn't particularly care about today). "It's a judgement on us! A judgment!" he howls with the best of them. "That the symbol of truth and purity has gone out rather than listen to our squabbles!"

That might be too much for even the more gullible members of the Sun Chamber on a regular day, but this is not a regular day. This is a "we have lost our collective fucking minds" day. The shrieks that sweep across the Chamber would be worth seeing someone die of plague right in front of you. Harry hides his chuckle and makes his leisurely way to the door of the Chamber.

He has other stops to make.

Harry strolls slowly through the Ministry, listening to the plans for Kingsley's funeral.

He still hasn't decided if he should release Kingsley before the funeral. He likes the thought of wasting the time of people who right now are writing elaborate lists and battling each other for responsibilities that they think will make them look more prominent.

But then he sighs and shakes his head as he realizes that he can't do that. It would make him look less like a Dark Lord, and he needs them to believe that at least up until the point when the Elder Wand's spell rolls through their minds.

He pauses when he hears a familiar voice, and cautiously extends his head around the corner. Percy is standing with his hands clenched in front of Arthur. It looks as if they've been arguing for at least a few minutes.

"So this is the reason that Harry went mental!" Percy throws up his hands and stalks around as though he thinks that he'll have to do that to keep from hurting someone. "I always thought that he was exaggerating, that—"

"He did exaggerate," Arthur says, with a sigh and a shake of his head. "Listen to me, Percy. There are still plenty of good people among the pure-bloods. Some of them are idiots, of course they are. But that doesn't justify destroying the world."

Harry watches, and knows his mouth is gaping a little, although since he's under the Disillusionment Charm, that doesn't matter. What could have happened to make Percy, the good little Ministry automaton, turn his back on his ideals? Harry is sure it has to have been huge, but he hasn't heard about anything like that, and he can't imagine that he would have missed it. His spy network is too good.

"Two people I trusted came to me this morning, and told me that I had to set up the paperwork saying that Harry was a bastard child and hadn't really inherited from Sirius Black after all," Percy whispers. "Because they're more concerned about those titles than anything else!"

"Well, there are some people who will stop insisting that Harry is right and we have to trust him after we strip him of his titles."

Percy looks at his father as if he's advocated drowning kittens. "And that's what we should focus on? And we should lie to do it? Dad, Harry is the son of Lily and James Potter, and they were legally married! I can't set up paperwork saying they weren't!"

Harry relaxes a little. That would be it, then. Percy has been dishonest before, and followed dishonest people, but always when he sincerely believed their lies were the truth. Being asked to lie deliberately doesn't sit well with him.

"I don't think we should do that. But you can see why people are panicking and wanting everything dismantled, right, Percy? Knocking Harry down from his perch as a Lord would help a bit with that."

"I'm not going to do it," says Percy, and he carefully puts down the parchment that he's holding on the desk next to Arthur. "You can do it, Father, since you don't see anything wrong with it." He snaps his head at his father in a way that makes him recoil with surprise, and then turns and walks out of the office.

He walks next to Harry, so Harry can see the angry glitter of tears in Percy's eyes. Harry watches him go. He never meant to break the Weasley family apart. But then, in a way he already had. Arthur and Molly know perfectly well, or ought to, why Bill and Fleur and their children went into hiding, and they have to know that Ron probably knows where Harry is but won't speak of it.

Arthur picks up the parchment. His head is bowed. Harry would go to him and speak to him if he thought it would do any good at all.

But he knows very well that it won't. Arthur would either pretend to listen to him and then go off and spread stories that would lessen the impact of what Harry's trying to do, or arrest him right away. So Harry waves sadly at the man who might have been his father-in-law if things had been different, not that Arthur can see it from under the Disillusionment Charm, and walks father into the Ministry.

Yes, the room where they keep the wands that he promised the werewolves and goblins is still unguarded. Harry shakes his head with a different kind of sadness as he slips inside. He wonders if everyone is too distracted to bother with the guarding, or if they just never thought he would come after the wands.

"Stop right there."

Harry halts. There's a guard, after all, although she's a young Auror trainee with more determination than sense. She also is obviously looking for the subtle shimmer of an ordinary Disillusionment Charm, since she has her wand pointed in completely the wrong direction. She only knows he's there because she saw the door open.

"Halt!" she cries, even though Harry hasn't taken a step forwards since she spoke the first time. Then she fires a curse at the wall. Harry rolls his eyes a little as he watches small chips of stone fall to the floor.

Well, he did have a plan in mind if he ran into a situation like this, although Ron told him off for being a right evil bastard when Harry mentioned it. Harry waves his wand in a careful pattern, concentrating on the illusion he wants to project. And then the image of a floating, dead Kingsley encompasses him, so that he's a ghost.

The trainee gasps and almost drops her wand. "S-sir?" she whispers. "You came back? Are you going to haunt the Ministry?"

"Only if you don't start respecting the bloody obvious!" Harry snaps, projecting the illusion of Kingsley's voice as hard as he can. Voices have always been harder for him than images, since it's harder to hold a memory of what they sound like in mind.

"I'm sorry, sir." The trainee stands taller, her hands clasped around her wand as if she's about to offer it to him. Her head tilts a little. "What do you want me to do?"

"We need to deny these wands to Harry Potter. He intends to break in here and take them for the werewolves and goblins."

The absolute conviction in his voice, of course, is what makes the trainee put her hands over her mouth instead of on her wand. She looks ill. "That would be—that would be dreadful, sir."

"Of course it would be! But I can't move them, because I'm a ghost. I need you to take them to a safe place that I'll show you."

The trainee hesitates and glances at the door. "I don't know if I should—"

Harry manages to imitate Kingsley's long, disgusted sigh just fine, because he's heard it so much. "Fine. I suppose that I'll find someone more daring and more true to her training." He turns the illusion so that it looks as if Kingsley is about to march out the door.

"Please, please, sir, don't!" The trainee dances back in front of him. "I promise, I'll move the wands! But I might get in trouble for it!"

"Do you want to get in trouble or do you want to serve your Ministry and save the world from the Dark Lord Potter?"

The trainee bows her head. "When you put it like that, sir…"

"Of course I'm going to put it like that. It's the truth."

Honestly, the hardest thing Harry has to do after that is keep the laughter out of his voice as he directs the trainee to move the wands to a storage room near his old office. She conceals them in her pockets and strolls with a forced nonchalance through the corridors that would bring most experienced Aurors down on her at once.

But no one is careful enough to notice her now, and she manages to tuck the wands away in the storage room without anyone being the wiser. She doesn't hold her breath after Harry barks at her not to do it, either. Soon enough wands are moved that Harry thinks he can leave the others.

"We have to leave some here," he tells her sternly in Kingsley's voice. "Otherwise, someone who doesn't have the good of the Ministry at heart might get suspicious."

"That's true, sir." The Auror trainee pauses, her eyes huge. "You—you don't have any messages to give me before you pass on to the other side, do you?"

"Yes. You've done well."

Harry makes the illusion fade then, and leaves the trainee looking around in awe. He goes to the storage room and removes the wands, although he leaves illusory duplicates of them in place that will last a few hours in case she comes and looks, or loses her nerve and leads someone there. Then he ducks into the mostly empty lift that will take him down to the Ministry Atrium.

And he manages to get all the way home before he does burst out laughing.