"Your insistence on the both of us drawing up postmortem instructions for the Order before we leave is -"

"Justified," Alastor interrupted Albus. "We might be finding a horcrux in an abandoned building today. Who knows what kind of nasty curses You-Know-Who might have put on it? Or what kind of nasty curses the Gaunt family might have built into their walls for that matter. This is high enough priority it shouldn't wait, but it would be an absolute disaster if we both kicked it barely a week before Sirius raises a bunch of Inferi in London and we set the River Thames on fire before heading to a battle with the Death Eaters at Barty's place. Thousands dead, war over, we lose, guaranteed."

"Your point is taken, but it seems to me we could avert your vision of disaster by having only one of us go to Little Hangleton."

"Alright, then who do you want to read into the prophesy, horcrux, and/or Sirius situation? Because I can tell you, I'm not going on a dangerous mission like this alone, and I'm sure as hell not letting you go it alone when I need you next week."

Albus looked over his half-moon spectacles at him, looking highly amused. "No one, as I'm sure you understand. Very well, I see I'm not getting out of it. I'm not writing anything down, though. I think your portrait is more than capable of divulging our secrets to the rest of the Order."

Alastor scoffed. "You can't delegate leadership of a resistance movement to a portrait, Albus, even if it is mine! Lucky for you, I've already written down my bit, which should cover most everything in the short term." He pulled out a roll of parchment and placed it on Albus' desk.

Albus frowned and snatched it up. His eyebrows rose. "This appears to be a series of arithmetic calculations, not a will of any kind." He cast a few secrecy-sensing charms, coming up with nothing. "Also, the math is wrong."

"It's in code. A muggle code that I hand wrote, no magic needed. I gave the key to the code to the portrait," Alastor said smugly. "Portraits can't be Imperiused or otherwise magically coerced, you know. And if we put a traditional scrambling charm on top of it, then if someone tries to unscramble it without knowing the code, they'll think they've messed up the countercharm and assume they've rendered it unreadable through their own incompetence. Although the charm itself encourages them to look more than they might otherwise if you just crumple and toss these somewhere on this parchment graveyard you call a desk."

"I am... mildly... impressed, Alastor. I do not have the time to convert all of my notes regarding Sirius' intelligence and my own horcrux research into a similar code, nor do I think it wise to leave such profound secrets lying about, but... I suppose you do have a point." He reached up his sleeve and untied the mokeskin pouch on his arm. He took a single sheet of parchment from his desk. He looked up. "How would I write in your code, 'I, Albus Wulfric Percival Brian Dumbledore, on this day the seventeenth of March 1979 hereby leave the contents of my mokeskin pouch, which I keep inside the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, to my brother Aberforth Amadeus Owen Dumbledore, in the event of my death'?"

Alastor thought for a moment, reviewing the rules of the cipher. "Hold on, if I try to do this in my head it will be wrong, and then your mokeskin might not accept the message. Let me just write it down for you." He drew his wand and scribbled Albus' message in glowing letters in the air, then waved his wand again to rapidly convert it to the proper code: I, Dmjvb Ddlisqd Ylaclwim Kyraq Ecnksndrsm, pw aqiv eiz con shwmoclnnwi wg Vhack 1979 imsnih lhbdf con crobfwab oi ng nxrnsnjv qxblh, ziqdq P tehq qobpme wim Ixnfauua Txyciqh Pbc, ax mb czpconr Dcmsovatk Bubmlds Rxmo Mbvboflpal, rn wim felwt rg uz mljtk. "Rewrite that assigning each letter of the alphabet its place number alternating plus five and minus five, and you've got it."

Albus raised his eyebrows and looked back at Alastor's roll of parchment. "Ah, the 'letters' of the 'words' are multiplied together, and you alternate addition and subtraction marks for spaces between words depending on the positive or negative value of the products. Which makes equals signs full-stops. No commas?"

"I wasn't writing mine in legalese. If you want your commas, you can just tag on the letter 'c.'"

"Very well. Incidentally, is this a shift cipher?" he asked as he started writing out his own message.

"Yes, actually. I just converted it to numbers to make it less obviously a coded message. Figures you'd know what a shift cipher is."

"I found muggle cryptography interesting once upon a time. What is the code for this one?"

"Tomorrow's date."

"The time you would expect these documents to be found if we do not return to destroy them. Sensible." He signed the coded parchment with a flourish and handed it to Alastor to witness, then got up and stuffed both the parchment and his mokeskin pouch inside the Sorting Hat. He held up his finger to the ratty old thing. "I expect you to give that back." He turned back to Alastor. "Shall we? Fawkes can take us outside the castle wards."

"We shall. I'll apparate us the rest of the way." Alastor had gone to the effort of taking an honest-to-Merlin Muggle train up to Little Hangleton a few nights ago to scope out the area in preparation for this. He was sure there were no anti-apparition wards, caterwhauling charms, unplottability, or other large-area anti-trespassing spells on the region. If there was something there, its containments were localized and clouded by the general pall of Dark magic that clung to the old Gaunt shack.

Less than a minute later, the two of them were walking down the road outside the muggle village of Little Hangleton. The evening was almost pleasant, cool without being chill, overcast and therefore starless, but not raining. Alastor lit his wand for Albus' sake. The road was easy to see with his magical eye, as was the Gaunt shack itself even through its enshrouding trees. He'd stopped his investigations well short of the grove earlier, not stupid enough to risk the obviously still-magical place without backup.

They stopped at the edge of the trees, where night became blackness, at least to his normal eye. Not even Alastor's Lumos ball penetrated the thick shadows, as if they stood at a true wall rather than a porous border of vegetation. Alastor took out another wand, one of the confiscated spares kept in the auror department. "Hasta." The wand lengthened into a spear, and he used it to physically probe the gap between the nearest trees. There was nothing. He touched a tree. Still nothing. This wasn't a conjured fog or other atmospheric effect, but it also wasn't a barrier of any kind he'd seen before.

Albus' long-fingered hand reached out to touch the nearest tree before Alastor could stop him. Fortunately, nothing happened, but still, "I know you're Albus bloody Dumbledore, but can you please not just explore suspicious wards with your bare hands? For me?"

"I probed it mentally first. It is a fascinating effect. But I do not believe the peculiar gloom here is Tom's work. It feels far older, and unintentional. An accumulation of accidental magic from generations of unhappy, twisted childhoods, perhaps." He lifted his hand from the tree, looking saddened and pensive. "The veil of misery and fear is not directly harmful, Alastor, so long as we two remain clear-headed."

Now knowing what to look for, Alastor used his usual wand to cast a variation of the Juvenile Trace spell and found, depressingly, that Albus was quite correct. The shadows were made almost entirely from untamed, immature, human magic. He grunted. "Alright then. Let's go in. But slowly, and by the book damnit!"

"After me, then?"

"Hell no, after me. I'm far more expendable."

"You are not expendable, my dear Alastor."

"I didn't defeat Grindelwald." Without waiting for Albus to protest that that was precisely why he should be permitted to go first, Alastor started casting all the trap-detecting spells he knew, which was rather a lot. "Appare Vestigium, Aparecium Agitante, Cave Inimicum Ocularis, Fianto Duri, Revelio, Specialis Revelio, Creatura Revelio, Inmortui Revelio, Revelio Inimicarum, Informus Regio, Oppugno Detectis, Geāsciġe Feorhbealu, Geāsciġe Nihtgenġena, Geāsciġe Aclæccræft, Hwæt-Cȳþ-Diern, Uppgötva Hið Illa, Bespeur Boosheid, Lorg Droch Ribe, Canvod Droog ..." The only thing all that made clear was an ungodly number of snakes infesting the grove, even more than he'd noticed just looking with his magical eye. "Vipera Evanesca." They vanished.

He edged forwards, probing the ground with his spear-wand, probing the cloying shadows with his magical eye, probing the air and trees with his magical senses. He didn't trust that his revealing spells had penetrated all the way through this grove haunted by the mystic griefs of long-dead children. Albus followed after him sedately, studying every tree as if he were merely appreciating nature, for all he was most likely growing impatient with Alastor's measured approach. It took them an hour to walk the twenty feet to the door of the hut. Alastor did uncover seventeen traps, but they were all extremely old to the point they had lost most of their power. And they were mostly directed at muggles anyway. He left them intact. No reason to tip Voldie off earlier than necessary that they had come here. He might even replace the snakes before they left.

Speaking of snakes, there was a partial snake skeleton nailed to the door. The rest of the bones littered the threshold. Interesting. Judging from the rotting look of the place, the preservation spell and wards against the varmints that should have long-since carted off those bones was somewhat new. Even if snakes were the only animals left in the grove with all the Dark magic in the air, the bones should have been buried by the weather alone after so many years' abandonment. The other interesting thing was that Alastor couldn't see through the door or walls to glimpse the interior of the ramshackle building. He smiled, now more certain they would find something. He recast all his trap- and curse-detecting charms on the door, and Albus added in a few wandless probes. They removed the obvious traps until the only curse still detectable was a ward that would make the door explode in their faces if they attempted to write or inscribe any runes into it. Alastor snorted in mirth. Voldemort would have been smarter not to ward the door, as the presence of that curse was as good as a note to "keep looking!"

Albus bypassed the antiscrivening ward by conjuring an entire runic circle and ritual pentagram out of silver wire and suspending it near but not actually on the door in order to identify the sixteen more subtle curses hidden in the door, threshold and lintel. One weird curse was of a design Alastor had never seen before, that Albus deduced would have eaten both their feet off the moment they crossed the threshold.

It took another hour to dismantle all the protections. At one point, they contemplated whether breaking down a wall would be safer, but closer inspection showed the wood of the walls had somehow been infused with potent poisons that caused Alastor's bezoar test particle to combust when he brought it too close. They resumed their careful assault on the door. Around midnight, they entered the shack. There were three rooms, if you could call them that given the collapse of half the interior walls. The main room they stood in was once both kitchen and living room, Alastor thought, while the other two must have been a bedroom and larder. There was no sign of plumbing for either the kitchen or any bathroom. The only recognizable pieces of furniture at this point were a single broken chair and an uneven table. A cast iron cauldron lay rusting in the hearth.

Alastor's eye was quickly drawn to the floor, or rather, the one part of the shack that had a floor, in the old bedroom. He pointed. "That's where we're aiming. There's a metal box under one of the loose floorboards over there, and I can't see the inside of it."

"My complements on your recently enhanced vision, Alastor."

They moved cautiously through the shack, continuing to check for traps as they went but finding nothing once they were past the impressive defense of the front door. Alastor levered up the loose floorboard with his spear-wand, exposing the box. The box itself proved impossible to move with a levitation charm, but Alastor had come prepared for that as well. He reached into his pocket for the funny muggle device Arabella Figg had given Albus as a joke Christmas present. He had shrunk it down to fit in his pocket, but it wasn't electronic, so it would still work once resized back to normal. A few seconds later, he held a long stick with a handle at one end and several prongs at the other. Arabella had told Albus it was to help old people pick things up off the ground without bending over and hurting their backs. Alastor thought it was a convenient way to handle potentially dangerous Dark items. He poked the box a few times to make sure it wasn't designed to explode or something with simple movement before grabbing it with the device and lifting it out of its hole to set on the floor. It was small and made of gold, but the decorations were entirely geometric, nothing to identify the box's origin or significance.

Oddly, although the box was completely coated with all the secrecy and magic-consuming spells that made it impenetrable to Alastor's magic vision, its lock was entirely ordinary. Which made Alastor think the box was more to keep traces of magic from whatever it contained in rather than to actually pose a barrier to anyone who knew what they were looking for. There weren't even any curses on it that either he or Albus could detect. Which was so bloody suspicious, he was tempted to set fire to the thing right then and there, except they really needed to confirm whether they had found a horcrux first. He touched the spear-wand to the box and muttered the same Greek incantation Sirius had used to identify the journal horcrux, "Oὖλε ὁλόψυχος." Nothing happened. The box was just a box.

He took a deep breath and muttered, "Alohamora, Aberto." The lock clicked. The box opened. Inside nestled in dark velvet was a heavy gold ring inset with a dark stone, possibly black although it was hard to know in the bad lighting. "Lumos." Yep, the stone was black. He moved the light slightly, and the shifting reflection drew attention to a faint carving on the stone.

There was a sharp intake of breath beside him, and Albus' hand shot out.

"Claudo," Alastor said quickly, and the box snapped shut again just before Albus' fingers reached their target. The muggle grasper thing still in hand, he thrust that forward to pin the closed box in place. "Are you a toddler, Albus?! What makes you think touching that is a good idea?" he hissed. He looked up at his companion with his normal eye, the magical one remaining firmly fixed on the box. The old headmaster's face had turned deathly white. He looked stricken, as if in the grips of a powerful boggart.

"Did you see the mark?" Albus asked in a strained, hollow voice.

"Not well. I was too busy saving your hand."

"A triangle, containing a circle, bisected by a vertical line."

"Grindelwald's mark?" Alastor said, raising his eyebrows. No wonder Albus was shaken.

Unaccountably, Albus chuckled, though without much humor. "Only by appropriation. No, that was the Gaunts' and before them the Peverells' mark long before it was his."

Alastor's brow furrowed. He had no idea why Grindelwald, a Hungarian by birth if he recalled correctly, would take the emblem of an old British family for his own. More to the point though, "And you're shocked and alarmed to find what is apparently a symbol already associated with the Gaunt family in the Gaunt house... why?"

"You are familiar with the Tales of Beedle the Bard, Alastor?"

Alastor grimaced. "Do you remember that conversation we had about how little I care about the metaphysics of Divination?"

"Yes."

"I care even less about the legendaria of children's stories and how they elegantly tie together the Dark Lord of the previous war and the biological family of the current one. We are standing in a poisonous death trap, if you had forgotten, so get to the point."

Albus hesitated, looking uncommonly off-kilter, but then he offered a shaky smile. "Practical as ever, Alastor, and I am thankful for it. You must forgive my foolishness just now, for in my review of the Gaunt lineage after you brought them to my attention, it appears they are descended from Cadmus Peverell, who is thought to have been the historical second brother in the 'Tale of Three Brothers' by Beedle the Bard. I saw a black stone with the Peverell crest, itself the sign of the Deathly Hallows, belonging to the last heirs of Cadmus, and, well, I was overtaken by... academic excitement at the possibility that that ring is set with the Resurrection Stone."

Academic excitement? Alastor would bet his remaining eye it was more than that. He stared at Albus a moment, then laughed darkly. "No wonder the box wasn't locked. Anyone who could get through the door was bound to be well-read enough to recognize the mark, Grindelwald's or Deathly Hallows or otherwise, and be surprised enough to forget caution. That ring is definitely cursed. You are not touching it. I'm not touching it either." His magical eye spun around in its socket, quickly checking the house for other suspicious hiding places and finding none. "In fact, we are done investigating this place. We are taking the box out of here and burning it elsewhere, because I don't want to see what happens when Fiendfyre comes into contact with all the Dark magic around here."

"We still have to confirm it's a horcrux," Albus pointed out. His voice was reasonable, but the glint in his eye was not an indulgent twinkle but a spark of strange desperation that Alastor thought had nothing to do with Lord Voldemort and his horcruxes.

"Naturally. We will confirm it is a horcrux once we are in a safe location. And then I will destroy it, box and all, whether it's a horcrux or not."

Albus actually gaped at him. Alastor had never seen him gape at anyone before. "You can't just destroy the Resurrection Stone!"

"Why not?"

"It's... It's... It's a priceless historical artifact! Of a kind of magic that is utterly lost to us!"

"If it's the Resurrection Stone," unlikely, "then it's a historical artifact that killed its own inventor, according to the story. An artifact of Necromancy, the Darkest of Dark Arts, for all the stone's power in the story was less of an abomination than usual. Plus, it's definitely cursed. I'm not willing to risk one of us ending up disfigured or dead just so you can satisfy your intellectual curiosity, Albus. Plus, it's probably a horcrux, and I'm definitely not willing to risk losing the war just so you can satisfy your intellectual curiosity. You made me second-in-command of the Order of the Phoenix. That makes my most important job in the Order telling you when you're making a mistake. Right now, you are. We are going now."

So saying, he collapsed his spear-wand and stuffed it up his sleeve into its holster. He picked up the deceptively harmless gold box, locked it again, conjured a leather case to keep it secure, and tucked it in his pocket, along with Arabella's pickup tool, shrunk back down to fit. He led the way back out of the shack, Albus Dumbledore trailing quietly behind him, lost in thought. He closed the door. He vanished the headmaster's abandoned wire runic circle. He replaced the vanished serpents when they reached the edge of the grove. He led Albus a short way down the lane, took his arm, and apparated them both to an empty moor in the Scottish highlands. He strode in a circle, casting various muggle-repelling and concealment charms around them, then took the box back out and set it on the ground. He opened it again with a flick of his spare wand, then once again said "Hasta" to lengthen the wand to a spear. He wanted to do this from a safe distance. "Oὖλε ὁλόψυχος."

The ring bounced up out of its box, turned over three times in the air, then hung suspended as a ghastly apparition swelled out of it. It was like a ghost, but too solid, and too inhuman. It was like a gray-skinned, gray-clothed, gray-eyed animated sculpture of Voldemort, if the sculpture was made of wax and was in the process of melting. It opened its mouth to speak, and its inside was white fire. "Hail, Dark Adept," it said in a voice Alastor could not hear with his ears but felt in his very soul. It was the same phrase the journal horcrux had written to Sirius. And yet this was so much... more. Was it because Albus was right about the stone's original power?

"Finite Incantatem," Albus intoned in a commanding voice. The construct collapsed into a ball of white light and flew back into the ring, which fell back down to strike the edge of its box with a tiny plink. Albus looked down at it, expression a mess of warring sadness, triumph, and anger. "I should have spent the last few months hatching a basilisk," he said with uncommon bitterness.

Alastor snorted. "And even if that worked to destroy the horcrux but leave the stone intact, I'd still make you burn this thing. Its effect on you is rather alarming."

Albus' lips twitched. "I am a man with many regrets and many losses, Alastor. The second Hallow is the one I always craved the most, foolish old man that I am."

"Good thing I didn't let you go alone tonight, then. I don't care if you're wanting that thing to properly apologize and say goodbye to Doge and Bones, or if you're thinking about someone you didn't save from Grindelwald's War, or even just missing an old beaux, we need you here and present to win the current conflict. You can go into mourning afterwards. Now step back. Ignis Diaboli!"

They both watched as the jet of flame devoured the ring and box. Just as with the journal, the cursed fire exploded out of Alastor's control with a huge, screaming human head that lunged at them, but Albus incanted the countercurse at the same time as Alastor cut off the flow of magic from his own wand. The grandsorcerer easily quelled the angry flames this time, with so relatively little fuel to feed them compared to the contents of an entire wizarding mansion. Nothing remained where the box had lain but scorched earth. No gold, no black stone. Alastor tapped Albus' shoulder. "Come on, back to Hogwarts. You need a drink."

Author's note: things go better when Moody is around to say "no touching!" lol. And sorry, not sorry, the Deathly Hallows plotline always annoyed me. Mostly because it wasn't set up in previous books very well and so seemed to have been invented in order for both Harry and Voldemort to kill time so they could have their final confrontation at the end of the school year like always. It's also extremely weird that Moody's eye can see through Harry's invisibility cloak that is otherwise supposedly impenetrable. I'm choosing to believe that's because the cloak's power is focused on countering Dark magic specifically. Moody's eye isn't evil, and it can be warded against with the right kind of concealments or else it's just way too overpowered. In this case the spell on the box that absorbs magic in general absorbs the magic of his vision, and the huge concentration of Dark curses and poisons on the Gaunt shack similarly eat up anything magic or otherwise that tries to penetrate them.

Thanks for the reviews! Updates Saturdays, but I might be able to squeeze out a bonus chapter with the long weekend...