Disclaimer: I own neither Harry Potter nor Katekyo Hitman Reborn and I don't earn any money with this story.
Author's note: We're getting closer to that first arc finale, wohoo. And you'll get some more background information.
Rating: M
Warning:
As always, this chapter has been beta'ed by the lovely NonchalantxFish!
'I'll never get used to this,' Reborn mused as he tried to recover from the most recent trip by side-along Apparition. 'But if everything goes as planned, I won't have to.'
The last few days had been spent spying on a certain snake-faced bastard to find out a) Blaise's whereabouts and b) the wizard's next steps in this war. Unfortunately, they'd been deprived of seeing more than a minute or two of Voldemort's epic temper tantrum following Reborn's departure from Malfoy Manor, because the closest Spidbot, which Spanner had hidden in an old grandfather clock in one corner of the meeting room, had become the victim of a rage-fuelled blasting hex. Not knowing of its untimely demise at the time due to Bellatrix' interrogation and therefore the revelation of Blaise's kidnapping, the young Lightning hadn't been able to replace the bug in time.
An hour after the carnage, another Spidbot had filmed him leaving the meeting room, still fuming, and marching to the ball room, where he'd promptly summoned his remaining Death Eaters and Snatchers. Voldemort's minions had been informed about the attack and ordered to find and capture the Malfoys - dead or alive - followed by a hefty punishment for letting an intruder into their headquarters in the first place.
Afterwards, there'd been a lot of brooding on Voldemort's part for a few days, but whatever plans the wizard had hatched in his disturbed mind, he'd kept them close to his chest. In all that time they'd found neither hide nor hair of Blaise, either. Until the previous day, that is, when Voldemort had gone on a little trip and one of the Spidbots had latched onto his robe in time to side-apparate along.
The dark wizard had appeared in a windowless room with walls made of stone, akin to those of a castle, and strode over to a prone, shackled body on the ground. Harry had quickly identified said person as Blaise and the cup next to him as the Horcrux they were looking for, whereas Snape had recognised the teen's unnatural stillness as the result of a potion called Draught of Living Death. Fortunately, it was easy to negate with the right antidote. Reborn had half-expected that they'd need something ridiculous like a True Love's Kiss.
Finding the location of the building had been easy due to the wonders of GPS and now, a day later, all five of them, plus Bill Weasley, were standing in front of an old but well-kept hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere, which actually did resemble a small castle.
Well… to be more accurate, they were standing outside the warded property, twenty feet of lawn between the house and themselves. Finding out who owned it had proven impossible, and they'd already tested whether Lestrange, who was currently under the Imperius curse, was coincidentally keyed into the wards or not. Considering she'd been sent flying when she'd been ordered to approach the house and climb the gate, it seemed improbable.
"It was a long shot anyway," Shamal mused, while Snape kept the witch from giving it another try. The Mist pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket and lit one of them, before he turned to the only redhead in their midst. "It's your time to shine, ward boy."
"You think you're so funny, but you're really not," Weasley drawled, rolling his eyes, but approaching the wards anyway. Before he had the chance to untangle the web keeping them from their prize, however, the sound of a backfiring car drew everyone's attention and various weapons made an appearance just in case.
On the other side of the gate a young, blond man had appeared. He was immaculately dressed and there wasn't one hair out of place, but the dark rings under his grey eyes pointed towards stress and sleepless nights.
"Malfoy." Harry stared at the blond in surprise, mixed with a healthy dose of apprehension. "This is your property?"
"Mine?" The young man huffed a derisive snort and shot a glance over his shoulder towards the stone building. "I guess now it is."
"Lucius is dead? You're the new Lord Malfoy?" Snape's face did something complicated and even Reborn, who was trained in reading expressions, had a hard time to identify more than a hint of regret and grief. What had happened to the patriarch of the Malfoy family had been unclear. The last time Reborn had seen him, the man had been sedated but still alive.
The blond, Draco Malfoy apparently, laughed hollowly.
"My father is gone. He was killed a few days ago." The young wizard wrapped his left hand around one bar of the gate with enough force to turn his knuckles white. His gaze darkened even further and blazed with hatred as he eyed them one by one. "I know it was your fault. You broke into Malfoy Manor."
Reborn frowned and hopped onto Harry's shoulder to have a better vantage point.
"I didn't kill your father."
Malfoy zeroed in on the Acrobaleno and scrutinised him for a long moment.
"The Dark Lord did. My fath-" The blond's voice cracked half-way through the word. He cleared his throat and tried again, but he still sounded strained. "My father was already teetering on the edge of the inner circle, because he had given away an object the Dark Lord had entrusted to his care.
"He persevered, slowly regained the Dark Lord's trust, but then you infiltrated the manor and killed almost everyone from his inner circle. My father was… the only one left alive in the meeting room… The Dark Lord accused him of conspiring against him and cast the Avada Kedavra. He put mother and me under… under the Cruciatus for a while, but one of the house elves interfered. It saved us by bringing us to another property. Mother still hasn't… she hasn't regained consciousness, yet…"
"And what is your plan now?" Shamal inquired, perhaps also wondering whether the teen was out for revenge. If that was his plan, he was out of luck. Reborn alone would send a bullet through his heart long before Malfoy uttered the first syllable of any spell.
Instead of gearing up for a fight, however, the blond turned halfway around to stare at the hunting lodge again.
"I know that Blaise is in there right now, along with an object that's important to the Dark Lord. After I became Lord Malfoy, all of the house elves approached me to verify if they should go on with their current tasks. One of them was supposed to take care of this house..." He released the gate and focussed his gaze on Harry. "Make no mistake, Potter, I hate you, you and your little minions for starting this, but… you're the lesser evil right now."
The blond took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.
"I want him dead! The Dark Lord, I mean. I don't know what he's planned for me and Mother, but it can't be anything good and you're my best bet at survival, Potter, so I'll help you this time. I don't know how to key people into the wards, yet, and I wouldn't key you in anyway, but I can bring Blaise to you."
"That… came as a surprise," Harry mused out loud as soon as Draco had disappeared inside the house, antidote for the Draught of Living Death in hand.
He'd never seen eye to eye with the other teen, not even during their first days in Hogwarts. Warding his possessions, something the brunet had learnt from Blaise, had quickly become a necessity if he'd wanted them to remain in one piece and where he left them. Living in the same dorm room with Draco Malfoy and his goons had also done wonders for his alertness concerning danger.
The blond's willingness to help them, if only to save his own hide, was surprising, but Harry wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Hopefully with this, they'd have enough time to separate Blaise from the Horcrux while ensuring his continued existence. Negating the curse itself was impossible, even according to Bill, but they'd managed to figure out a loophole or two, and a course of action that was more risky than not.
It had to work! Harry wouldn't accept another outcome!
About ten minutes ticked by before the hunting lodge's front door opened again. Draco had slung one arm around Blaise's back to support the other teen, who was stumbling along. Harry stepped closer to the gate and worriedly eyed the countless bruises and cuts he could make out even from this distance – the result of torture, which had lasted for hours. He'd already seen the wounds through the camera of the Spidbot, but taking everything in with his own eyes was even worse.
What turned his stomach the most, however, was the heavy chain hanging around the other teen's neck and the golden cup attached to it.
The last remaining Horcrux.
The final safeguard between Voldemort and mortality.
The first two had been destroyed a long time ago, during his second year in Hogwarts. Harry had been hearing a hissing voice all year and due to the snake who'd lived in his garden whom he'd sometimes conversed with, he'd recognised the distinct characteristics of Parseltongue, though he hadn't known the skill's name back then. At first the brunet had believed the reptile to be just someone's ill-tempered and slightly deranged pet and had tried to broach the topic with some of his professors. None of them had taken his concerns seriously, though all of them had been shocked upon learning of his skill and advised him to not tell anyone else. They reason being the apparently bad reputation of Parselmouths, mainly perpetuatedbecause of Voldemort.
Things had heated up a few months later, when the first student had been found petrified, quickly followed by about half a dozen more victims. By then, Harry had known about the Chamber of Secrets and the similar events a few decades prior. The school had once again been in danger of closing down.
A few days after the seventh petrification had taken place, Harry'd heard someone talking in the hissing syllables of Parseltongue when he'd been passing Moaning Mytle's bathroom by chance. Because it hadn't been the same voice, the brunet had got curious and entered the bathroom just in time to see a flash of red disappear down a hole in the middle of the room, where the sinks usually were. Harry hadn't had enough time to get help, because the opening had already started closing. Following whoever had jumped down there had therefore been the only viable choice.
The path had led to the Chamber of Secrets, where one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, a diary, had started to leech the life force out of Ginevra Weasley. Upon noticing the intruder, it'd set a fucking fifty-foot-long basilisk at Harry.
The good news: He'd somehow managed to defeat it with the help of his headmaster's phoenix and the Sword of Gryffindor, which the bird had brought along.
The bad news: One of the basilisk's poisonous fangs had pierced the brunet's arm, when the wizard had slayed the overgrown snake.
Harry had already been at death's door, when he'd felt something in him crack open; something that had functioned as a floodgate for a foreign energy until then. It had spread throughout his body, soothing but unfortunately not healing. Fawkes had yet again saved him by crying into his wound, neutralising the poison and knitting his flesh back together. Only later had Harry found out that the Horcrux stuck in his scar had sealed his Flames all those years ago. With the basilisk poison weakening it, his Sky Flames had been able to break free and destroy the Horcrux completely to re-establish the Harmony in his body and soul.
The third of Voldemort's soul pieces, contained in a Gaunt family heirloom ring, had been found by Dumbledore during the Christmas break of Harry's fifth year. While the brunet had been recovering in hospital, after being attacked by the Estraneo, the old man had retrieved it from who knows where and had got himself fatally cursed by it. Severus had been his last hope, but when Harry's Cloud had finally got the message and gone to Dumbledore, the man had already been on the cusp of death. With his dying breath, Dumbledore had entrusted him with the ring, his notes on Horcuxes and a pleading to find and destroy them.
Harry and his Guardians had come to a decision on the matter a few days later, when the brunet had been attacked in Ospedale Nicollò de Luca by Death Eaters. To this day they had no idea how they'd found him, but it had proven that Voldemort wouldn't just leave him be.
In the beginning, they had planned to get rid of the Horcruxes by themselves and not involve anyone else. They'd bought a house in the middle of nowhere, slapped a Fidelius on it and worked through Dumbledore's notes. The notes featured a prophecy about Harry, of which Severus knew the first few lines of. Getting into the Minstry of Magic and listening to the whole thing had left Harry utterly unimpressed and determined to ignore it. It had, however, explained why Voldemort was so bent on killing him.
Said self-proclaimed Lord hadn't been idle in the meantime, either, however. A few months after Dumbledore's untimely death, he'd broken his minions out of Azkaban and somehow replaced the majority of the higher ups in the Ministry with his own people. Attacks on wizards and witches opposing Voldemort had changed from random Death Eater attacks to persecutions by the Ministry itself.
The first safe houses had been established, additional ones had quickly followed. Some of them were properties Harry had been gifted with from people who wanted to help the Boy-Who-Lived. Back then Blaise had still been more on the neutral side of things due to his mother's similar statusas well, but that had quickly changed when she'd been killed by Death Eaters during a raid on Diagon Alley.
Horcrux No. 3, Slytherin's locket, had been destroyed shortly after Harry's seventeenth birthday. Now of legal age in the wizarding world and thus old enough to inherit, Harry had been contacted by the goblins. (And their secret trip to Gringotts had also led to their catastrophic attempt to break into Bellatrix vault, that they'd never, ever be talking about again!) Among his new possessions had been an old house of the Black family, which was situated in London and had shortly belonged to the godfather he'd never really met. While sweeping the house for anything useful, they'd come across the grumpy house elf living there and the locket around his neck, which exuded black magic on par with the other Horcruxes. Connecting the dots hadn't been hard.
Around the same time, Spanner had finally managed to build version one of the current Spidbots, surveillance gadgets running on Flames rather than electricity and therefore usable in magic-rich environments. Severus, who'd still been keyed into the wards surrounding Malfoy Manor, had apparated onto the property and scattered them there. Unfortunately, he'd been spotted and removed from the list of approved people shortly thereafter and the bugs had malfunctioned perhaps a month later. They'd still learned about the diadem, which Voldemort had apparently retrieved from Hogwarts and secured in a certain Scottish highland cave.
And now here they were, about to destroy the last Horcux.
By now Draco and Blaise had reached the gate, the latter sending a small, tired smile at Harry, who returned it with a trembling one of his own. The gate opened with a wave of the blond's wand, and Blaise was unceremoniously pushed over the invisible line of the wards. Harry barely managed to catch him in time, but when he did, he directed a glare at Malfoy from behind his friend's shoulder.
"Well then, Potter. This is where-"
Malfoy was interrupted by the almost deafening sound of countless people arriving by Apparition. Harry swallowed thickly, before turning around and staring at one of his worst nightmares – Voldemort, standing in front of an army of Death Eaters, werewolves and even trolls.
"Did you really think that trick would work on me twice, Potter?" the dark wizard sneered and raised one bone-white, skeletal hand. Dangling between his thumb and forefinger was a half-crushed Spidbot.