Harry Potter and the Physical Adept
Chapter 20: My Bloody Valentine
Author's Note: I've been told by my editor to include a Trigger warning for this chapter because it contains sexual violence.
"Thank you, Harry."
The shadowrunner immediately looked up from the math problem he was solving at his desk.
"This is the first time you've ever called me that," observed the Hermetic mage. "It's always been 'Wolfgang' or 'Amadeus' or 'Tolliver'."
"Don't forget 'Phoenix', 'Gideon', 'Jacoby' or 'Everest'," Luna added with a smile.
"So, why am I being thanked?" Harry asked.
"Thank you, for what you did to daddy," the blonde said. "I received an owl this morning; he was torn apart by a pack of wild animals while the police had him in holding."
"I've been here the entire time, so it couldn't have been me," Harry protested without any real conviction.
"But you could put somebody on it," Luna said perceptively. "Patience, for example."
"If you think I had your father put down like you're suggesting, why are you thanking me?"
"I didn't know how to tell him 'no', even though I really wanted it to stop," said the girl. "When mummy died, daddy said it was my turn to take over all the things she used to do; I thought it meant cooking and cleaning, but then daddy wanted me to take care of the other things mummy used to too.
"He told me that I was so pretty and looked so much like mummy, and I was scared daddy wouldn't love me anymore if I said 'no', so I did it, even though I didn't want to. Every time we did something after that, I wanted to beg him to stop, but I was scared he wouldn't love me anymore, and after a few times, I was scared he'd ask why I wanted to stop now after we had done it so many times already."
"Yeah, I don't know how to respond to that," Harry said, fidgeting in his seat.
"I just wanted to say 'thank you'," Luna said.
"How are you always so calm, even when you're talking about a traumatic experience like this?" Harry asked. "What's your secret?"
Luna exhaled deeply, then took a deep breath. "When it first started, I felt like I had lost control of my life completely," she said. "All I could do was go along with what was happening to me. Eventually, I just got used to taking things as they come and not worrying about things that are out of my control. Just go with the flow, you know, and anything bad that happens to me, it just happens. Nothing I can do about it, so nothing to worry about."
"That sounds like a coping mechanism," Harry said. "Being so passive in your own life doesn't seem like a good thing, though."
Luna shrugged. "Nothing can hurt me. Or scare me. Or surprise me.
"Listen, if there's anything I could ever do to help you…"
"Let me stop you right there," Harry interjected. "I didn't get rid of the person abusing you just so I could take advantage of you myself. What kind of monster do you take me for, Dia?"
"The best kind," said Luna with a sweet smile. "I like you a lot, you know?"
"Look, you're just feeling grateful now, but things are only going to get a lot harder for you from here on out," Harry said. "You're an orphan now, which means you're probably going to have to go live with relatives, and they might not like the new burden you represent."
"I don't think I have any living relatives," Luna said. "I've never met any."
"That's even worse," Harry said. "That'd make you a ward of the state."
"You could adopt me, like you did Liv," suggested the Hufflepuff girl.
"What about me?" asked the dragon, finally looking away from the television on which she was playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
"We could be sisters," said the blonde brightly.
"We'd need to get your paperwork in order," Harry said. "You have paperwork, right?"
"Paperwork?" Luna asked.
"Like a birth certificate?"
"I don't know what that is."
"A record of your birth," explained the dragon.
"I was born at St. Mungos, so there might be one in the Ministry."
"That's not a place where I'd want to do an acquisition run, so let's just say, legally speaking, you don't exist to the normal world, which is a problem, because I exist in the normal world, and that's where I'd try to adopt you."
"Is there anything you can do about it?"
"I could ask Jason to get you papered, but that might be problematic, since it'd probably conflict with any of your paperwork the Ministry has."
"What if we destroyed that paperwork?" Liv suggested. "It'd be less targeted than an acquisition run so it'd be easier, and since it won't be as targeted, it'll be much more difficult to identify the true target of the run."
"Even then, it'd have to wait until the summer," said the shadowrunner. "It's not like we can just leave campus at will right now, and somebody might try something in the intervening period."
"If they try anything, I'll pull them apart," the dragon growled fiercely.
"I know," Harry said. "We'll just have to keep them at bay until it's handled."
~ooOoo~
January went without incident, melting into February in a blur of lessons, independent study, gaming club meetings, and hours upon hours of research and development; he was closing in on a solution to polymorph any object, he could feel it, but there was still so much work to be done before he would get the results he wanted.
"Oy, you! 'Arry Potter!" shouted a dwarf one Sunday afternoon, as Harry emerged from an abandoned classroom he had been performing research and development in; since the end of Christmas break, he had traded hunting and foraging for more research time, choosing to instead stock the trunk that contained his industrial kitchen with enough frozen food meats and vegetables to last the rest of the term.
The Hermetic mage kept walking, having no intention of being entangled in the scheme he had heard the useless Defense professor was responsible for.
"I've got a musical message to deliver to 'Arry Potter in person," said the dwarf, twanging his harp in a threatening manner as he ran after the Boy-Who-Lived.
"I wouldn't advise it, if you like your kneecaps," growled the shadowrunner, quickening his pace.
The dwarf managed to get one word out on key before he screamed in pain as gidgee found bone and cartilage.
"My knee!" shrieked the dwarf as he crumpled to the ground.
"I did warn you."
No other dwarf tried to deliver Valentine's Day messages to the Boy-Who-Lived that day.
~ooOoo~
"This just doesn't make any sense!"
It was Valentine's Day afternoon in the gaming club, and Harry had made a flourless chocolate cake with fudge buttercream frosting to serve with cold milk as refreshments, and Hermione was fuming between bites and sips. He had made it clear to its attendees that the club session was not a place for giving him Valentine's Day messages, which he then demonstrated by having the first person to try to give him one thrown out.
"How many discrepancies have you found?" Harry asked.
The Ravenclaw checked her memo pad again. "Two hundred nineteen across all of his books," she said.
"That's a lot," Colin said as he joined them at the table, carrying a piece of cake on a paper plate and a stack of polaroid photographs documenting the celebration.
"I want to ask him about it during his office hours today, but I'm wondering if I should do another pass on his books first," Hermione said thoughtfully.
"It's dangerous to go alone!" Liv quipped, in the midst of devouring a whole cake by herself. "We'll come with."
"Yeah, it's better to strike while the iron's hot," Harry agreed. "You want to go now?"
"I might as well," said the Ravenclaw, wiping her mouth and pushing her plate away.
"Can you watch the club for me while we're gone?" Harry asked Colin, and the first-year nodded an affirmation.
The walk to the celebrity author's office was short, with Liv and Luna trailing a few steps behind the second-year students hand-in-hand, a common sight for the first-year Hufflepuffs.
Standing at the office door, Hermione hesitated for a moment, looking to her friend for support.
"If you're going to question his books, you might as well make a grand entrance," Harry advised.
Taking a deep breath, the Ravenclaw gathered herself, then threw the door open.
Time seemed to stand still in that instant.
The foppish Defense professor must not have expected company, as his pants and trousers were around his ankles, leaving him exposed below the belt.
Thrown over his desk, tears streaking her face, was a girl with her shirt torn open, her black skirt hiked up over her waist and her Hufflepuff yellow necktie pulled tight around her throat, the other end in one of the professor's hand, with his other hand yanked on the girl's long plait of hair.
He must have forgotten to lock the door.
"CONTACT!" roared the shadowrunner, stepping forward and shoving the Ravenclaw behind him with one quick motion as the professor seized his wand, laying on his desk aside the crying girl, and pointed it at the intruders, shouting "Obliviate!"
The tip of the professor's wand glowed green for a moment.
"On your six!" the dragon declared, placing her left hand on the shadowrunner's shoulder as she stacked up behind him, her right hand pointing her Beretta at the professor; in front of her, the Hermetic mage had drawn his own pistol, training it on the author, who had yanked the half-dressed girl up by her hair and was hiding behind her, his wand pointed at her neck.
"I've got one hostile, with a hostage as a human shield," the Hermetic mage said.
"I'll kill her! I swear I will!" Lockhart shouted, wand hand shaking.
"I have the solution," Liv whispered into the Hufflepuff boy's ear.
"Take it," the shadowrunner growled back.
Instantly, the wand in the professor's hand exploded into splinters as the dragon fired her pistol; surprised, the fop instinctively released his hostage to clutch his injured hand, and in an instant, the shadowrunner closed the gap, leaping over the desk with a flying forearm that collided with the Defense professor's jaw before firing his pistol rapidly as he swept his arm back on the reverse directing, stitching the floor — and the author's legs — with bullets as he emptied the magazine downwards.
"Argh!" Lockhart cried, his legs giving way under him. Before he could collapse completely to the floor, though, the shadowrunner had seized him by the collar, striking him in the face repeatedly with the butt of his pistol in a flurry of unbridled violence.
"Stop it!" Hermione shouted as she checked on the professor's victim. "He can't answer questions if he's dead!"
The boy paused long enough to holster his pistol, then grabbed the man's splinter-filled hand, bending it forcefully in the wrong direction.
"How many?" he demanded calmly.
"I don't know what you're talking about!" the fop protested.
"Wrong answer," growled the shadowrunner darkly. Then, he wrenched the man's index finger backwards; with a bone-crunching snap, the finger broke at the joint, dangling uselessly against the back of the man's hand.
"Aughhh!" screamed the professor, tears forming in the corner of his eyes.
"How many?" the shadowrunner repeated.
"I lost count! I lost count!" Lockhart shrieked.
"I don't believe you," the Hermetic mage growled, as he broke another finger. "Cunts you like, you always keep count of your conquests."
"I… I have a book…," admitted the author weakly, on the verge of passing out. "Over there… black cover… silver and red ribbon…"
The shadowrunner looked at the dragon, who quickly found the book the author had indicated. Opening it, she quickly flipped through it, expression growing increasingly distressed, before she finally turned it towards the Hermetic mage, who only took one look at the page the dragon had stopped at and broke the remaining intact fingers on the hand he was holding.
"Three students since January?!" the Hermetic mage growled, as the author whimpered, tears rolling down his cheeks.
"What's the harm if they don't remember?" protested the Defense professor weakly, as though it was an acceptable justification.
"Rook, hold this drekhead," snarled the shadowrunner, suddenly wrenching the man's hand sideways, making him shriek in pain as his wrist broke and his knees buckled.
Without a word, the dragon tossed the little black book onto the desk and grabbed the man by his shoulders, pulling him to his feet while the shadowrunner pulled his switchblade from his pocket, flipping it open and seizing the author by his bollocks, slicing them clean off with one vicious cut before ramming the blade of his knife into the man's chest just below the sternum and forcing the blade down, shoving the severed gonads into the open cavity and then pulling his intestines out of his belly, tossing them over a candlestick besides the office window.
"Send 'im."
Without a word, the dragon threw the Defense professor out the window behind them, and he screamed as he broke through wood and glass, grabbing uselessly at the air as he fell, his organs tearing from his insides as he plummeted to his death, body splattering on the grass below on impact after he was defenestrated and disemboweled in the same death.
"It's okay, you're safe now," Luna told the sobbing girl, gently draping her robe over her and holding her close comfortingly.
"We have to report this to the headmaster," the Ravenclaw said.
"You really think he'd care about a serial rapist?" snarled the shadowrunner. "Last year, he hired Voldemort as the Defense professor."
"Professor McGonagall, then," Hermione proposed.
"As deputy headmistress, she's Dumbledore's creature if there ever was one," the boy argued.
"Then who can we report this to?" the second-year girl asked.
"Nobody," the Hermetic mage said. "But if you must insist, her head of house will have to do."
"That'd be Professor Sprout," Hermione said. "I'll go see if she's in her office."
"I'll take Susan back to her room and stay with her until she feels better," Luna volunteered, helping the girl with the torn clothes and tear-stained face to her feet.
"You didn't have to kill him," said the Ravenclaw, pausing at the door, looking torn.
"You were on his target list," Liv said, jerking her head in the direction of the little black book laying on the deceased professor's desk. "If you had come here by yourself, you'd have been a victim, just like her."
"What about justice?" she asked.
"He's a serial rapist who uses magic to erase the memory of his crimes from his victims' minds," the shadowrunner snarled. "I gave him justice."
"Street justice! He should have been tried in court!"
The Hermetic mage fixed the Ravenclaw with a hard look. "Just go get Sprout," he growled.
Hermione disappeared through the door, leaving the dragon and the shadowrunner alone in the dead professor's office.
"We need to sanitize this scene, make it like the kill never happened," Harry said, and the dragon nodded. "No screams from below, so nobody's found the body yet."
"I'll handle that." Liv said, before going out of the window in a twisting dive.
The shadowrunner looked around the room, examining the chaos that had been left in the wake of the incident. One disintegrate reduced the entrails to dust, and one perdo corporem cleaned the rest of the blood and viscera from the room; once the room was cleaned of the evidence of the torture and murder, the boy straightened it out, returning it to a semblance of organization while pocketing the little black book, then dug out the slugs from the floor with his switchblade before repairing the rug and the wood underneath with mending. A perdo herbam took care of the wooden wand fragments, and he collected the dragon heartstring that had been its core.
Sitting down at the dead professor's desk, Harry flipped through the staggering amount of correspondence laying about, absorbing his writing style and penmanship for several minutes before taking up a piece of parchment and quill.
With a deep breath, the shadowrunner began to write the professor's formal request for a leave of absence. Afterwards, he would break into the author's chambers, pack his things and make it look like he had left in a hurry.
~ooOoo~
Harry hadn't expected the law to get involved, as he had expected a cover-up, but he also hadn't known the victim he had inadvertently saved was the niece of the department head of Britain's magic badges.
Within an hour of Hermione reporting the incident to the Hufflepuff Head of House, aurors were crawling all over Hogwarts despite the headmaster's protests, looking for evidence of the crime and interviewing witnesses. Unfortunately for them, the dragon and the shadowrunner had thoroughly sanitized the crime scene of all traces of the incident that had transpired, and the blood oaths made it impossible for Hermione and Luna to disclose anything they considered a secret of the circle, leaving the victim, the dragon and the Hermetic mage as the only ones capable of giving an account of what had happened, and the latter two were not giving anything away for free.
Thus, the boy found himself sitting in an abandoned classroom when he would normally be doing research, face to face with the stern older woman who had introduced herself as Madam Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
"Mister Potter, please, in your own words, please tell me what happened yesterday afternoon in the offices of Gilderoy Lockhart, Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts," she said.
"No," the shadowrunner refused flatly.
"No?" said the experienced investigator, surprised.
"No," the Hermetic mage repeated. "I see no reason to cooperate with you."
"Mister Potter, I am the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement," said the woman. "I would advise you to cooperate with this investigation."
Harry retrieved Lockhart's little black book from his pocket and tossed it onto the table between himself and his interrogator. "Go ahead and read that," he said. "Then, we can talk some love."
"What is this?" Amelia Bones asked, as she picked up the book.
"That cunt's little black book," growled the shadowrunner.
Silence descended upon the room as the woman opened the handwritten record, her calm demeanor giving way to increasing horror as she turned the pages. When she finally closed the book and put it down on the table, she looked like she was going to be sick.
"If what Miss Lovegood, Miss Granger and my niece have told my subordinates and I is true, then he must have had more than two hundred victims, including more than two dozen here at Hogwarts since August," she said, standing up. "I need to speak with the other names in his book who are here, but I'll be back, so don't go anywhere."
"Where would I go?" the shadowrunner challenged, leaning back in his seat, a book on the history of berserkers already in hand.
~ooOoo~
It was well after nightfall when the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement finally returned to continue her interrogation of the boy, looking drained.
"So, what'd you find?" asked the Hermetic mage, as Amelia Bones sat back down across from him at the table.
"None of the alleged victims could remember anything happening to them, but they all have gaps in their memory that could correspond to having the Memory Charm cast on them," said the head auror with a sigh.
"So, you have nothing," said the shadowrunner.
"We have my niece's memory, which can be viewed in a Pensieve," Amelia Bones argued.
"Can a Pensieve tell the difference between a memory, a fantasy, a hallucination or a delusion?"
A brief pause followed.
"No," admitted the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
"And, did you know memories are altered ever-so-slightly every time people access them for the purpose of remembering them?," asked the boy, and the woman shook her head in the negatory. "With this in mind, wouldn't you agree the memory, even if viewed in the Pensieve, would be something a good defense attorney could tear apart in minutes?"
"Yes," said Madam Bones begrudgingly, giving the boy a look one would normally reserve for a worthy opponent.
"So, like I said before, you've got nothing," the shadowrunner reiterated, and the head auror's shoulders slumped.
Across the table, Amelia Bones sighed.
"Off the record, I can appreciate what you did to Lockhart," she said.
"Allegedly did," the shadowrunner corrected.
"Allegedly did," Madam Bones agreed. "Even though I don't approve of it, if it weren't for you and your friends, we likely would never have found out about what he was doing, and even if we did, with the Memory Charms, it would have made prosecution difficult, if not impossible."
"So, like I said, let's talk some love," said the boy.
"Excuse me?"
"I allegedly assisted you in uncovering a series of crimes you knew nothing about, and allegedly brought to justice a sexual predator you would have had inordinate difficulty convicting in court," said the shadowrunner. "I do believe that deserves a bit of reciprocation."
"Mister Potter, what exactly are you asking for?" asked the head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
"Miss Luna Lovegood was recently orphaned when her father died under mysterious circumstances while in the custody of the Metropolitan Police," said the Hermetic mage. "I imagine there must be interest from various parties who wish to take her into their care."
"I don't know much about the politics of it, but because Miss Lovegood is not from a pure-blood family, none of the Sacred Twenty-Eight have expressed any interest in her," said Madam Bones. "Since she has no living relatives or godparents, she'll likely end up in the care of one of the minor families, some of whom seem almost too eager to take her in, and not for the right reasons."
"What would I need to do, if I wished to adopt her?" asked the Hermetic mage.
"What is your interest in Miss Lovegood?" asked the head auror, her eyes narrowing.
"Luna is my daughter's best friend; I'd hate for anything bad to happen to her."
"And you have no ulterior motives?"
"If I told you, they wouldn't be ulterior now, would they?"
"I suppose not. I could have the paperwork started for you if that's what you want, but raising one daughter by yourself, at your age, must already be difficult enough."
"I'll handle it. I'll also need a copy of her birth record."
"Why?"
"I exist primarily in the normal world, the one you people refer to as 'muggle', and I'd like my daughters to have a presence there as well, so I'll need paperwork that I can get matched to something there."
"Very well; I'll have a copy of Miss Lovegood's vital records owled to you if and when her adoption into the Potter family is completed."
"You may also want to check in with your niece regularly; victims of rape will sometimes have suicidal thoughts following their trauma."
"Are you threatening my niece, Mister Potter?"
"No, I'm genuinely concerned about her; she's an innocent victim in all of this, and there's no reason she should lose her life just because she suffered a loss of innocence."
A moment of silence followed. Then, she sat back in her seat.
"I don't know what to make of you, Mister Potter," she said. "At first, I thought you had been mistakenly sorted into Hufflepuff, because you have the cunning of a Slytherin, but then you demonstrated the knowledge of a Ravenclaw, and now, the caring of a Hufflepuff."
"Labels are meaningless," said the shadowrunner with a shrug. "They only serve to put you in a little box so people can feel more comfortable when they make snap judgements about you. It's why I'm in Hufflepuff, because people like to think of them as harmless."
"I suspect I'll be seeing you quite a lot in the future," said Madam Bones with another sigh.
"I certainly hope not," Harry said. "If it does happen that way, then I would have to have done a lot of things very, very badly."
Author's Notes: And thus dropped the other boot.
This is why this Luna is the way she is. It was never that she was confident, just that she had adapted to be able to go with anything that happened to her, and it's why she's good at going with the flow and improvising; it's also why she's so free with her physical intimacy, because it's become cheapened to her.
Gilderoy Lockhart as a serial sexual predator always felt like the logical conclusion in a cynical world if a famous person who loved the ladies had magical powers that could make people forget things. In fact, it was one of the first points that came up when I originally outlined Physical Adept. And like many rich and famous people who do terrible things, Lockhart has found a way to justify to himself that he's doing nothing wrong.
Despite what he might say, Harry does feel rage quite acutely; it's often one of the few emotions that people who cannot really feel emotion in the normal manner is still capable of, like sociopaths or people with an Axis II personality disorder. And this Harry tends to express his rage with extreme violence.
Each person reacts to the situation differently too; Harry is enraged by the perpetrator, Liv follows his lead calmly, Luna is worried about the victim, and Hermione is first concerned with getting answers, then with her ideals of right and wrong.
How do you get away with murder? Destroy all evidence of the crime and then create a plausible alternative scenario.
I've always hated how the Pensieve and legilimency are both somehow considered reliable ways to obtain accurate information, because it completely ignores how human memories actually work; eyewitnesses have been proven to be unreliable time and again, and studies have show human memories literally change a small degree every time they're recalled, which is why things are pretty much always better in your memory, because your memories are lying to you, and can even be created out of thin air through the phenomenon of "recovered memories" (or False Memory Syndrome). Furthermore, let's say somebody is having an experience where, partway through it, they start tripping and start experiencing something different than physical reality because they're in an altered state; how would a Pensieve or legilimency be useful then, or even be able to differentiate between reality and delusion/hallucination of the altered reality wasn't too obvious or ridiculous? In my mind, the Pensieve and legilimency suffer from the original author's lack of understanding on how memory functions, and it suffers for it. It's why in this story, Liv can read who Luna is as a person because it relies on her self-image, which is based on her collective memories, rather than attempting to pick a single memory to watch as though it was a documentary on playback; if Liv had attempted the latter, she would have gotten just as inaccurate information as anybody else attempting it. In short, memories are not a reliable way for gathering information in this version of the universe.
Once again, many, many thanks to my long-suffering editor, Romantically Distant, for all their efforts in reading and proofing my writing. And now you've read this chapter, feel free to leave a review or just PM me, and, with the WARS pandemic still on-going, stay safe.