22) A witch in time saves (a lot more than) nine. (A/N at the end)
They'd all gotten off again. The entire society, starting with her generation, had been suckled on the teat of Dumbledore values. Forgive forgive forgive die painfully. She'd lost her husband. She'd lost her daughter. And now, they'd killed Harry and Teddy.
Purebloods had come back to power and were finishing what they'd started twice before. The ethos of forgiveness only worked if everyone embraced it. Death eaters and their ilk found it humorous and took every advantage.
Why wouldn't they? Polite society's Dumbledorian mores meant there would never be a reconciliation betwixt the sides.
She never thought she'd agree with anything her parents preached, but Dumbledore was wrong. Dumbledore had damned them all with his good intentions. And she needed to fix it.
The only plus side to being the last actual Black (Sirius had disinherited everyone else and reinstated her and Harry. Now, she was alone.) was that she absolutely loaded. She had money, property, and a vast library at her fingertips (Harry had added the Potter library to the Black one before he had been killed.)
She needed a plan. She started by listing the things she wished she could fix. Siri out of prison. Snape in prison, so that potions education could continue. A better head at Hogwarts. No instant forgiveness for death eaters – if Crouch hadn't gone down… he went down with Bella. The Longbottoms were supposed to have Harry. She plotted and planned and did research.
The ritual would keep her corporeal – though invisible - for less than the click of the sun. One hour. She searched archives, looking for the right people to influence… the right places to push in her precious hour. She plotted and planned like the Slytherin she was, and she knew, just knew what she had to do to make it all better.
~~ here we go! ~~
The day after the papers joyously proclaimed the fall of You Know Who, the nation was once again rocked by violence. Someone – an unknown assailant – had killed Albus Dumbledore. He was out, walking through Hogsmeade after visiting his brother's pub, celebrating the end of the war and the victory of the Boy Who Lived, when a spell from seeming nowhere pierced him between the eyes.
The fallout was instant and horrific. The celebratory mood was gone: vengeance was on everyone's mind. If a death eater wished to claim imperious, they had to prove it under veritaserum. When they were captured, they were checked for the dark mark, and they were tried. Most went to Azkaban, at some level, for some amount of time.
The Longbottoms, ready to come of hiding out with the Potters' bittersweet victory, remained under their fidelius for another month. This gave aurors time to capture the Lestrange brothers and Bellatrix.
During the trials, many names were brought out. Severus Snape was accused, and no wise, aged peacemaker stood for him. Slughorn continued to teach potions at Hogwarts while Snape sereved ten long years in Azkaban, medium security.
Barty Crouch, Junior was accused. He admitted being a sympathizer, but he'd not been marked. His rite of passage was to be an attack on the Longbottoms. The mark he'd been given had never set with murder. He did five years in the low security wing for even thinking to support the treasonous dark lord.
Barty Crouch, Senior, having been seen to hand out justice even to his own son, was given more reign. He pushed for a stricter, sterner head at Hogwarts. If miscreants were given consequences in school, perhaps they would live a more upstanding life. Perhaps weaker students wouldn't succumb to bullies and join them, rather being beaten by them.
Many understood this is what he thought happened to his own heir.
A new headmaster was appointed. Edgemont Churchill – from the wizarding branch of the family – who believed in protecting the castle and diversifying while enhancing the education. One of Churchill's first actions was to study the ward schema with the portraits' and ghosts' input. He worked to bring all the wards up to maximum. One of the wards was an animagus identification – this allowed Headmaster Churchill to find Pettigrew pretty early on as animagus. If Pettigrew were alive, obviously, Sirius Black was not guilty of killing him. A retrial was quickly arranged (the original trial being pretty much a sham), and Sirius was freed. (Now that two years had passed, the original trials in the death eater tribunal were gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Two other rushes to justice were found: one, Sylvester Shunpike, was found to be innocent, and released with compensation. The other, Milton Bole, was found guilty a second time. And the Wizengamot put more restrictions in place to make sure sham trials did not happen again.)
Harry Potter, who had been with Longbottoms since they rescued him from the Dursleys, Yule of the year his parents were murdered (they sued the Dumbledore estate, McGonagall, and Hagrid find the boy), was a healthy and well-adjusted toddler. Now, he had a godfather who, with the Black family training in dark arts and an unspeakable's training, knew exactly what the ugly scar was. Black promptly hired a parselmouth cursebreaker to pull it out of the boy and destroy it. Unbeknownst to all, a prophecy went black, becoming obsolete.
Meanwhile, the free shade of Voldemort spent years gathering his power in his personal circle in Albania. When he had gathered enough strength, he decided to possess a wizard and try to steal the philosopher's stone. The Flamels, however, were not stupid. They'd been targeted before by dark wizards after their stone. They captured the possessed wizard, pull out the evil spirit and drained it, adding its magic to their own ward schema. They realized, with the fight the spirit put up, that it must have anchors elsewhere, but that was not a problem the aged duo were interested in solving.
Lucius Malfoy, slippery to the bone, was able to turn his own trial to receive only five years in the minimum security wing of Azkaban. Yes, he had the mark. But his father had tied him to that contract. He had only provided money, and spells so very infrequently. He thought he might get away clean, but whoever killed Dumbledore turned the whole society against tolerance.
He was out, and he wanted vengeance. What better vengeance than to bring back his lord? He decided to send his master's diary into Hogwarts with Sandra Bones - the eldest of her family. The Bones family were a standard for the light – for that reason alone, Malfoy wanted them all destroyed. Unfortunately for him, the upgraded wards alerted Headmaster Churchill to the presence of the diary. Knowing it was out of his league, the Headmaster turned the vile thing over to the DMLE who promptly passed it to the department of mysteries.
Sirius Black, after his wrongful imprisonment and exoneration, went back to work as an unspeakable for the DOM. As he studied the diary, he knew what it was. He explained to his partner, Emily Bright, that it contained a soul piece. They could pull it out, if they had access to a parselmouth, or they could simply use fiendfyre or basilisk venom to destroy the whole thing.
After explaining to the head unspeakable, Croaker, they decided to try experiments to see if they could use this one piece to find any others. Unfortunately, the soul shard was destroyed in those experiments before they yielded results.
When Sirius's mother died, he had to clean out the townhouse before he could offload it. There was simply no other way to ensure that no one would be harmed by the vicious items in the toxic house. He was able to secure the library and other heirlooms that were powerful or had good memories. He kept the entire stash of wands, for example.
One particularly vile piece that he identified was a locket. It seemed to house yet another soul shard. He knew that his family was adamantly opposed to this magic, so he knew it was a recent addition to the collection. When he went to remove the locket, he was confronted by Kreacher, his mother's house elf. He told Kreacher that the locket was dark and must be destroyed.
The elf looked at Sirius askance. "Bad master destroy bad locket?"
Sirius nodded. "I'll even show you when it's done."
"Kreacher agrees."
Taking the locket into the department, he showed it to Bright and Croaker.
"Another one?" Emily exclaimed. "Merlin's pants, how many did the blighter make?"
"It might be a different wizard," Croaker cautioned, "but as that is the locket of Slytherin, I'm thinking it is our recent Dark Lord."
This time, as the locket might be Slytherin's and have historical value, they brought in the one parselmouth in the department. He cast the spell as Sirius instructed and the soul piece came screaming out. It dissipated under Sirius's curse.
Once they cleansed the locket, they noted that it could be used to allow any wearing it to do parselmagic. If they ever came across another soul shard, they might have the right tools now to actually make a compass to find the remaining pieces. Of course, they didn't expect to find any more pieces. Kreacher was called to see that the locket had been cleansed, and he worked with Sirius, disinfecting the Black townhouse from that day forward.
The next horcrux was found a few years later while Headmaster Churchill was cleaning the lost and found in Hogwarts Castle. The so-called "room of requirement" existed in a pocket dimension and was therefore not subject to the castle's robust ward structure.
Churchill had already hired diviners to find hidden rooms in the castle. He wanted to find the source of the defense curse. It hadn't been on anything in the castle proper, as the ward schemes would have found it and either neutralized it or alerted him.
The first place they had found was the chamber of secrets. Gently questioning the ghost of the girl in the toilet that seemed to hold the entrance, he realized there was some sort of beast that killed with a gaze. As the little snake on the sink indicated it might be a Slytherin beast – perhaps the famed chamber of secrets was held therein? – Churchill and Kettleburn believed they might be dealing with a basilisk. Churchill convinced the board to hire a team of beast exterminators and a parslemouth to find and kill whatever was in the chamber. The expensive venture more than paid for itself with the rendering of the centuries-old snake. But no curse was found in the chamber.
The second room the diviners found was explained to be the come and go room by Maury, the head elf. In the veritable Aladdin's cave, Chuchill found enough money and gems and antiquities to fill the Hogwarts trust for a century, if properly monitored. He could buy all the brooms and potions ingredients and pay for all the instructors salaries for all the classes he wanted to add.
And he found the tiara – almost certainly the lost diadem of Ravenclaw – glowing with its curse upon the school. He called the head unspeakable forthwith and Croaker came and took the tiara back to the Ministry for cleansing.
Bright and Black – wearing the locket – used parselmagic to transfer the shard to an actual compass. Instead of pointing north, this compass now pointed to next biggest like soul piece. First, they hunted down a piece to a nasty, run-down shack. Property records showed the shack was all that was left of the ancient Gaunt family – as the heir was in Azkaban, this hovel would be lost to the muggle world before too long.
"If You Know Who is the heir of Slytherin, that would make him a Gaunt of some sort." Sirius postulated. Bright shrugged.
"Doesn't matter who he is. Pretty soon it'll be who he was and we can all rest a lot easier." Emily argued and pulled her wand at the ready.
They soon found the ring and, through luck, grit, and skill, were able to block out compulsions. Sirius did the spell to pull out soul piece and destroy it. Emily scanned the ring, found another curse, and cleansed it. When the ring was no longer defiled (but still ugly), it disappeared.
"Huh. Must have been a head of house ring, spelled to return to the family vault," Sirius stated.
Bright shrugged again. "Doesn't really matter. Though the rune on it was familiar…" she sighed. "Back to the office? This place is creepy."
"You bet." Sirius agreed on all counts, and they apparated away. The ring, meanwhile, had returned to the Peverell vault, waiting for next Lord Peverell.
After a few days rest and several cleansing rituals, Black and Bright were ready to go again. The next piece, unfortunately, pointed to Gringotts.
With Croaker, the pair tried to figure out who could have the soul piece in their vault. They had done some reconnaissance with the compass and narrowed the location. "It's in the area where the Black vault is. Maybe I should finally complete some family business."
Sirius, now Lord Black since Arcturus finally gone on his next great adventure, dissolved Bella's and Narcissa's marriages, recovering back dowries, and cutting them from black family magics. Since neither of them truly paid for their actions after the war (Bella never got caught attacking anyone, and like Lucius, was able to get minimum sentencing), they'd pay. Sirius confiscated entirety of LeStrange vault and found cup. With Bright, he pulled out soul piece, killing it, and now the only large piece left seemed to be in the compass.
The needle of the compass seemed to spin endlessly. Playing a hunch, Bright took the compass through the ministry. If she got near one who was confirmed to be marked (as they served their time, they were allowed back in society, though they never were placed in positions even close in prominence or importance to what they had before their master's fall), the compass would point directly at that person. As she got farther away, it would spin.
Voldemort's soul was somehow tied to the dark mark.
Sirius and Emily did their research.
"How can we pull the rest of the pieces?" Bright asked, chewing her lip.
"Should we?" Sirius challenged. "We have no idea what it would do to the death eaters."
"It'all moot until we know if we can." Emily concluded.
Finally, after months of searching through the darkest and lightest magics, Sirius laughed. "What if we did a parsel reparo ritual? It finds lost pieces of an item and brings them back together."
They went to Croaker with their findings, proposal, and misgivings. "He won't be dead, really, unless we do this. As Saint Dumbledore might say, it's for the greater good. Do it."
The ritual was beautiful in its simplicity. They put the compass in the center of a circle and Sirius walked the circle, chanting the recall and repair steps in parsel. First the whisps he thought they had destroyed came back, screaming, being cleansed from the realm they were polluting. The Flamels got a ward warning as a massive amount of magic suddenly was ripped from the potential well. Finally, the ritual ripped the soul magic out of the dark marks, and each death eater was suddenly rendered comatose: it was as though they'd been kissed by dementors. They had tied their souls to Voldemort, and he took their souls with him.
Knowing now that no magic actually destroyed a soul shard – hadn't they just seen that the destroying a horcrux actually just spreads the soul piece out throughout the world, potentially corrupting all it touched? – Croaker threw compass containing Voldemort and his slaves through the veil.
None of the actors in the true downfall of Voldemort would have been so proactive if they'd had a leader - especially if they had a leader who preached peace, forgiveness, healing. Since Dumbledore was gone, the people who were left behind decided to close the Voldemort chapter, not let it rest.
And it was good.
~~finis~~
A/N I don't consider this bashing, though my hate-on for Dumbledore's character continues to breathe fiery-breath on the posterior of what muse I'm channeling these days. The title, if you don't get it, is a play on "a stitch in time saves nine" or "an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of care" or, as my original title/plot bunny was "Time travel: what if someone goes back in time to 1981 and kills Dumbledore. I hate that codger." LOL. I had just this and some short notes - snape can't be a teacher, Longbottoms wouldn't come out of hiding? - to give me this ficlet on my walk today. I typed it up and pasted it in here. Not beta'd. Just for fun. Hope you are all enjoying your summer as I'm enjoying mine. Birdbrain, out.