Chapter 4: I'll trade you "This" for the "Head"
The wail of anguish Harry let out as the Plot Hole dropped him down on an enormous pile of gold was almost as ear-piercing as a Banshee's cry. Why? Because our hero landed on the mountain of Galleon crotch first. Keep in mind that scant minutes ago, Harry unfortunately contracted a painful… ailment from a stranger he barely knew. Getting hit right in his newly diseased manhood was probably comparable to getting hit by a dozen Crucios at the same time.
Harry doubled over and cradled his much abused family heirloom in his hands as he rolled down the mountain of gold. It took him a long time to finally get to the bottom.
"Who's there! Come out! I heard you!" Barked a gruff voice.
Harry struggled for another minute or two before he could make a trembly moan that made him sound like a boy soprano (although he felt more like a castrato at the moment). When the other person (goblin, as it turned out) found him, he was still crawling on the floor like an over-sized slug.
The goblin took a look at Harry's face and turned pale with shock. "Harry Potter! How… What are you doing here! You can't be here!"
Disoriented with pain and dizzy with fever from the STD… hmm, unusual ailment, Harry sat up slowly and squinted at the creature in front of him. He had lost his glasses somewhere during the tumble down the Galleon mountain, and the pain and fever made his already poor vision swim. Besides, all the goblins looked the same to him anyway. "Griphook?" Harry tried the only goblin name he knew.
Surprise, surprise. This goblin turned out to be the Griphook indeed. What's the chance of that?
Griphook stuttered and forced himself to regain his composure. After a moment of quick thinking, he grinned at the black-haired young wizard and said casually to him, "You are here for your inheritance, of course. You've delayed it long enough."
"My inheritance?" Harry asked dubiously. There was something off about this goblin. It was obvious the Plot Hole had placed him in a bank vault, but shouldn't Griphook go screaming for securities to haul Harry's thieving ass straight to jail? From what he had learned in Professor Binns' history lessons (which was all about goblin rebellions), goblins hate thieves as much as Flat-Earthers hate gravity. For Harry to show up mysteriously in a secured Gringott vault, it was a miracle that he was not killed on sight.
"Yes, and to settle your accounts, am I right?" Griphook was almost purring. His overly sweet voice reminded Harry of Uncle Vernon kissing up to important guests over his special dinner parties. He knew the little bugger was trying to cheat him.
Harry decided to play along. "Sure. Let's not waste time. I need to floo back to Hogwart after this."
The toothy grin on Griphook's face looked positively feral. He took out a small silver box from his pocket and unsheathed an obsidian dagger from his belt. "It won't take long. A drop of your blood on the box, please."
Harry held out his hand and let the goblin make a shallow cut on his palm. The drop of blood sank into the surface of polished silver without leaving a mark. Seconds later, the box glowed warmly and opened up. Griphook was almost salivating with greed when the box revealed a large brass key with triple blades and an ornate bow.
Griphook squinted and read the inscriptions on the bow of the key, "Potter, Black, Weiss, Pendragon..."
"Hang on a second!" Harry interrupted the goblin with a raised hand. "What are you reading?"
Griphook seemed extremely pleased with himself. "Why, the list of vaults you are the sole heir of, naturally. Don't interrupt me, I'm not done yet. Durmstrang, Reed, and Emry. That's all."
Harry's jaw hanged open in shock. "You've got to be kidding me! How am I the sole heir of all those vaults? Most of the names I've never even heard of!"
The helpful goblin simply shrugged and said, "Your mother was adopted."
"My mother was... What?" Harry repeated dumbly after Griphook. He needed some time to digest this piece of information. However, the more he thought about it, the angrier he became. "That means I'm not related to the Dursleys at all!"
Using the moment of confusion, Griphook suddenly dove at Harry and grabbed his still bleeding hand, forcing it on a piece of parchment. Before Harry realized what the goblin was doing, it was already too late. His bloody hand print on that unknown piece of parchment was all it took for the magic to take effect.
"What have you done!" Harry demanded. As naive as he was in regards to magical laws and contracts, it was common sense that pressing a bloody hand print on a piece of parchment without reading it first would be a very bad idea.
Griphook cackled in glee. "Stupid wizard! Now all of those vaults are mine! Mine! You own nothing but the cloth on your back, and you are about to spend the rest of your pathetic life in a mine as a slave labour for attempted robbery of our great goblin bank! Alarm! Alarm! Intruder! Thief!" The midget menace sounded the alarm as he ran for the door.
Deafening noises of air raid siren blared all around him. Harry panicked and did the only thing his muddled brain can think of - he chased after Griphook and tackled the little creature to the ground like a magic-less muggle.
In his state of panic, he failed to recognize how unnaturally fast and strong he had become after contracting the mysterious strand of magical STD.
Harry stared at Griphook's severed head in his hand (and the headless body he was stepping on at the moment) in absolute horror. What just happened? All he did was tackling the guy! He couldn't possibly cause this much damage! What was he made of? Wet tissue paper? How the hell did he manage to twist the poor creature's head clean off with his bare hands? Oh dear Merlin! He squashed a gnome with his back-side not long ago and just now he decapitated a goblin with his bare hands. What's next? Gutting a house elf with his pinky toe?
The vault door chose this moment to swing open. On the other side of the open door, an elderly goblin and a dozen goblin warriors gawked in disbelieve as our hero stood in the middle of the supposedly secured vault with a freshly severed goblin head still clenched in his hand, green goblin blood splattered all over the place.
Freaking out like he had never before, Harry reached for his wand and Plot Hole'd his way out of this bloody mess before any of the goblin warriors can set foot in the vault to arrest him for trespassing, attempted robbery, and murder.
Our much traumatized hero was catatonic when the Plot Hole left him in the middle of a well-lit dwarven cavern. If Harry were more responsive to his surroundings, he would have been impressed by the grandiose architecture dwarves were famous for. Occupying one side of the wall was a massive forge that almost took up half of the cavern. A long workbench was placed at the opposite end of the cavern, and the wall was lined with various weapons.
"What an obnoxious green! Did you slip and fall in a puddle of troll boggers? You look like a freshly picked toad... Whoa! Is that a goblin head in your hand?" A stocky dwarf wearing a leather apron stopped working and put down the hammer on the workbench. He whistled and nodded appreciatively at the severed head that was still dripping gooey, green goblin blood on the floor.
Harry stared at the dwarf blankly. In the back of his detached mind, he could tell that the dwarf was male, probably in his middle age judging by the red, braided, bushy beard that covered most of his upper body (female dwarves had smaller beards).
"Good work! Let me guess; cutting curse? No, no, no. The edge is to rugged. Blasting curse?"
Harry shook his head and cleared his throat. He didn't know why he felt like he need to answer his question. "I... I tackled him. His head just... came off. I didn't mean to kill him."
The dwarf's pair of slightly charred eyebrows raised up incredulously at Harry's confession. "You mean to tell me, young wizard, that you ripped this goblin apart with your bare hands?"
Even though the statement sounded absolutely ridiculous, it was exactly what happened. Harry nodded.
"Balrog's whip! Are you sure you are a wizard, not a short giant? What great strength you have! What's your name, young Goblin Slayer?"
Harry shuddered. He did not want to be remembered as a slayer of goblin. "Harry. Just Harry."
The dwarf smiled kindly and introduced himself. "I am Gyver, son of Angus. I am the Master Smith in our clan, so my brethren call me Master Gyver. It's good to make your acquaintance, Harry the Goblin Slayer."
"Just Harry." He could not stress that enough.
"What about Harry the Goblin Ripper? Goblin Be-header? Goblin Decapitator?"
Harry shook his head vigorously at each graphic suggestion. He could taste bile in his mouth. "Harry, son of James is fine."
Gyver the dwarf looked slightly disappointed, but he quickly recovered. "Harry, son of James, we shall celebrate your great feat today. Let me call upon my clansmen and we shall gather and drink to your bravery. This treacherous goblin's head shall be mounted on a pike with your name on a plaque, thus your name shall forever be known as Harry the Mighty Goblin Bane."
The last thing Harry wanted was for anyone to associate him with goblin killing. He did not want to be the Bane of anything! Can't he just be normal?
"Um, look. Why don't you keep the head? I don't want the fame anyway." Harry plopped the severed head down on the workbench. He was trying very hard not to look at its face. The sticky, squishy sound of goblin gore smearing on the wooden surface did not improve Harry's mood either.
"Really? You would let me keep your hard-earned trophy? That's entirely too generous of you! Please allow me to trade you for it, at least." Gyver dug out a small, metallic device from his pocket and handed it to Harry.
The device was as small as a knife handle, and it had a red outer shell made from an unknown material. It was decorated with dwarven runes inscribed on the polished shell in gold. Harry thought it was quite pretty. "What is this?" He asked.
"This device is of my own invention. It's a Dwaren Warrior Axe."
Harry frowned in confusion. "This doesn't look like an axe."
"Ah, perhaps the name is too misleading. Allow me to demonstrate." Gyver took the device from Harry and held it in his hand with his thumb pressing on top of the golden runes. "Axe." He commanded, and the small object morphed into a double-edged battle axe that was as wide as the Master Smith's broad shoulders.
"Very clever." Harry remarked.
Gyver beamed at Harry's compliment. "That's not all. Take a good look at this. Knife, hammer, saw, spear, scythe..." The device morphed quickly into each of the weapon the dwarf specified. The list of tools this device was capable of morphing into seemed endless. "... Bottle opener, screwdriver, scissors, nail file, lock-pick, tweezers, toothpick..."
After ten minutes, Master Gyver finally done listing most of the basic functions (not all, because he forgot about some of them) for this multi-purpose dwarven hand tool. Satisfied with his demonstration, the dwarf handed the device to Harry and asked, "So, Harry, son of James, since you declined my invitation for the feast and parade, what do you plan to do next? Wrestle a troll to submission? That should be more challenging than dismembering a goblin."
Good question. Harry never planned to go on this bizarre journey in the first place, but now, the boy hero realized that he could not go back to Hogwart, the place he considered his home for the last five years. He was definitely a most wanted criminal in Wizarding Britain by now, maybe only second to the Dark Wanker, for breaking into a Gringott vault and killing a goblin in a very messy way. Knowing the Ministry's low opinion on him, Fudge would personally toss him in Azkaban to rot for the rest of his life. Objectively speaking, Azkaban was exactly where he belonged for the bloody murder he committed.
There was no place on Earth he could go now.
For the first time in his life, Harry was truly lost.
Albus Dumbledore was a firm believer of priority; for example, the Greater Good should come before any individual's need. It would be anarchy without order; it would be chaos without priority.
He was also a firm believer of Fate.
If a person's destiny was laid out by the stars, what use would it be for mere mortals to oppose the heavens?
Dumbledore let his tears silently streaked down his pale cheeks. It was time like this he would feel the full weight of his hundred and fifteen years of age. Sensing his great sorrow, his familiar Fawks started singing a melancholy phoenix song to lift his spirit. Alas, a song could not mend a heart that was shattered into a thousand pieces.
"Cruel Fate! Cursed Fate!" Taking one last pained look at his trashed office, Dumbledore moaned and buried his face in his trembling hands. "I ran out of lemon drops!"
A/N: I've read so many fics where Harry gained the goblins' friendship by showing them basic human decency or by speaking flawless Gobbledegook. I want to try something different this time.