Canon Omake first, normal chapter underneath
AN: This one didn't really fit anywhere else. To canon to be left out, to short to be a chapter. It's not as rigorously grammar corrected as the rest because I couldn't be arsed - cough, I mean, I'm sick, cough.
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Many adults would describe life as inherently Sisyphean.
Sisyphus had been the king of Ephyra, who had cheated death thus and thus been punished by Hades, the god of the underworld, to push a boulder up a hill, only to let it roll down, and push it up again, for the rest of eternity.
The reason why Sisyphean as an adjective gained such popularity was because of the modern realisation that a lot of the tasks one had to complete in life were essentially endless by their very nature. Thus, in a way life could be seen as a punishment, even if, unlike the Greek punishment, it was thankfully not eternal.
Of course, there was a strict requirement on what was Sisyphean, since, by definition, one needed to not enjoy the endlessly repeated task. Thus, if one enjoyed eating food, the biological necessity of eating it for the rest of one's earthly existence could not be considered a punishment and thus was not Sisyphean.
Buying food, however, was, since there were, to Harry's knowledge, no well-adjusted human beings who enjoyed buying stuff they knew would be consumed within the week, necessitating another shopping trip.
There were many adult tasks which were Sisyphean in nature. Work. Driving to work. Driving from work. Shopping. Cooking. Repairing.
Cleaning.
However,
Was not.
One of them.
After all, the boulder rolled down the hill, after Sisyphus had pushed it up the entirety of the hill. Cleaning, however, metaphorically never even got on the fucking hill. Everything existed in a perpetual state of entropy, no matter how much you clean it, it would only, ever, get, fucking, dirtier. From the creation of the object in question to its incineration in the heat-death of the universe. It would be nice if cleaning was Sisyphean, it would mean that it would be possible to actually clean one's living space to any capacity.
But how was one supposed to do this, when cleaning a space perfectly would imply dusting all surfaces, moving the furniture and not only cleaning underneath it but also cleaning the furniture itself? Cleaning was not Sisyphean, it was barely even a stop-gap measure between a semblance of order and complete utter chaos.
Every single adult, other than the mentally diseased ones Harry had ever talked to, hated cleaning with a burning fucking passion of a million suns multiplied by a thousand infinities. You had to do a bit of it every day. If you didn't want to do a fucking lot of it every week at once. And it never, ever, returned back to the state in which one had received the accommodation.
No, cleaning was not Sisyphean. Cleaning was just straight out hell. But not even that, because hell was at least static, whereas cleaning got worse and worse every time one did it. Because of the shit under the furniture, in the walls, it got worse, causing one to essentially clean only to get a dirtier space after every single attempt for the rest of one's life. It was as if Sisyphus would get kicked in the dick every time he succeeded in rolling the boulder up the hill. But every time that he did so, he'd get kicked in the dick one more time. One more time, each time, endlessly, for the rest of eternity. Until Sisyphus would be getting kicked in the dick more than he was actually rolling the fucking boulder.
Suffice it to say, Harry hated cleaning. Harry hated cleaning almost as much as he hated being water-boarded, tortured, or put into the high-security isolation ward in Azkaban.
That was why, because of this hatred, without which there would have been no love, he shed a tear as he looked at the inside of Privet Drive 4.
"Spotless," he breathed as honest to god tears slid down his face. His new secondary black wand slipped from his fingers and fell on the immaculate floor. He fell down to his knees. "I could eat off it," he whispered, looking at his reflection in the wooden floorboards
The realisation that with access to magic, with his new-found godlike powers, he would have to never clean manually again hit his body like a series of world-shattering heaven-defying orgasms. He spasmed as if he were having an epileptic attack. The perfectly coloured walls, polished windows, dustless curtains and immaculate air quality blurred in his eyesight as he became more and more overwhelmed at the sheer beauty of what he and Dobby had accomplished in less than an hour. Running through the house, house-elf and human magic combine to create an orchestra of angels.
"It do be clean, Master Harry," the house-elf muttered with a self-satisfied tone.
"It do be clean!" Harry shouted.
Aunt Petunia would love it, obviously. She was a housewife who'd been struggling with cleaning for longer than Harry had been alive in his last life. And even he, had anyone gifted him such a perfectly cleaned house, he would have treasured it more than all the gold in the world. He would have fallen to his knees, sucked the dick, licked the pussy, and made oral love to whatever non-binary genitalia combination the giver of such a gift would have had.
It was perfect.
"The power, unlimited power," the boy whispered. "Never cleaning again. Never, never, never, never!" he laughed maniacally.
To quote the Roman emperor Vespasian before he died of explosive diarrhoea. "Alas, I think I am becoming a god!" Harry shouted in ecstasy, and promptly, fell to the floor, frothing at the mouth from sheer universal gratitude.
Dobby, the beautiful creature, rushed over to his new employer and helped him shift into a stable side position so that he wouldn't choke on his spit as he shook on the floor like a fish out of water.
Harry had often considered the past few days what he should do with the elf, it would be hardly fair to give him absolutely no job at all. As the elf tutted over him, fretting and wringing the tea towel he was dressed in, he suddenly came to the decision that Dobby should also go to school while Harry was gone at Hogwarts.
But not any school. No, only the finest for the elf who'd helped him create this paradise on earth.
Dobby would be attending the British Butler Academy.
A tale worthy of its own spin-off series.
But that was a story.
For another time.
Harry passed out.
From joy.
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AN: Was unsure what to do with this for a while since it doesn't really fit the rest of the stories vibe. But, Dobby will actually be going to butler school, and Harry did clean the house, so it's sort of canonical. The actual chapter coming tomorrow.
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Continue at the actual story:
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Harry was sitting on the steps of Privet Drive 4, which, just to be stated once again, were incredibly pristine. A packed trunk was sitting next to him, and he was dressed in a comfortable outfit made for travelling. Short black jogging pants and a white T-shirt, with similarly white sneakers.
'You sure are wasting a lot of time for someone who wants to become proficient in legilimency in two weeks,' the disillusioned hat remarked sarcastically from the top of the boy's head.
"What am I supposed to do? I have to carry the wand with the trace for when Flitwick picks me up. Can hardly be casting an endless stream of Legilimency at you while I wait for the professor?" the boy replied, affronted. Unlike occlumency, which was somewhat of a learned instinctive reaction, legilimency was a good and proper spell. It was an incredibly complicated one, too, and it didn't seem like Harry was going to get it down to a wandless, or even a silent manner, for that matter, any time soon.
The hat simply chuckled into his head at his frustration. Harry was only now starting to appreciate how difficult that particular act probably was. The hat was legilimising him so thoroughly that it sometimes seemed as if they had a telepathic connection. It would read his thoughts and reply by sending out little packets of language through their connection.
He sighed. Magic sense had been the most painful skill he'd ever learned. Occlumency was the most stressful. The disarming jinx the most tedious. Potions the most annoying. Legilimency however, was shaping up to be the most complicated.
'Nobody said it would be easy,' the hat sing-songed inside his head as an almost imperceptible crack resounded through the neighbourhood of Privet Drive, and a small man dressed in an old-fashioned muggle suit came out of a conveniently placed abandoned alleyway.
Harry stuffed the hat into his trunk. Flitwick would likely lift his trace for the tournament, somehow. He would legilimise the hat during the lonely nights in Vienna instead of practising for the duelling tournament. It sucked, but, well. Priorities. He wasn't going to win this one anyway, and the whole next Hogwarts year would be spent similarly to the previous one. Practising duelling.
He'd been getting a bit into enchantment and curse-breaking, of course, with his magic-sensing. But… Having resolved the issue of the trace by finding out its effective range and getting a second wand had made him push the need for those skills down the list of priorities. He had recently been thinking, after his destruction of the diary, if there was a way to maybe fit the entire Hogwarts Library into one book so he could take it with him. But that seemed unlikely.
"Hullo, professor," the boy greeted as Flitwick finished making his way over to his side of the street and waved once he'd gotten close enough.
"Good day to you as well, Harry," the man said, putting a strong intonation to his use of the first name.
Harry awkwardly chuckled and rubbed the back of his head. He listlessly waved his arms, pointing at his trunk. "I'm ready to go," he proclaimed.
Flitwick looked at him critically before turning his head up and looking at the front entrance of the house. "I would have assumed your family would have wanted to see the professor bringing you away to another country for an entire week?" he asked dubiously, at which Harry could only shrug.
"Well, Filius. They already met you, and it turns out that being mature beyond one's years also grants one certain privileges in the muggle world. I can look after myself," Harry said.
"Oh, of that, I have no doubt. I can't wait to see the faces of your opponents when they get hit by the first disarming jinx." He chuckled before waving a hand in the air. "Anyway, we should be off then. I did want to convene earlier, but I ended up being delayed with a task I had to finish in my position as a Hogwarts professor," the man said and stretched out his hand towards Harry.
The boy assumed that if everything was going according to canon, Flitwick would be tasked with creating an obstacle room on the third floor to protect the philosopher's stone. Although, at this point, with several Horcruxes already destroyed, with Neville as the boy who lived and James Potter alive… Well, things were already quite off the rails. Rather than expecting to see any of the elements present in the first Harry Potter book, it would be more surprising if there were any at this point. He took the professor's hand, and they disappeared with a crack, leaving behind an empty street.
Stumbling to a stop and managing not to fall on his face, a great success, Harry righted himself, clutching his trunk like a lifeline, in the ministry atrium. He stepped forward off the platform, already hearing someone new arrive behind him.
"Is it alright to apparate in full view of the street like that?" he aske, as the two of them took the same path they'd taken a year ago, past the disgusting fountain with its statue glorifying the subjugation of other magical races, and through the checkpoint, towards the large queue waiting in front of the golden elevator cages.
"For me, yes, but definitely do not repeat my behaviour when you learn to apparate. The Department of Mysteries brings out a new series of spells every year to confound muggle senses from afar, allowing things like apparitions and minor displays of magic. However, the charms have been getting more complicated by the year, and the only reason I still keep up with learning them is because of how innovative they are," the professor explained, occasionally nodding at ministry workers who recognised their erstwhile professor and waved.
"So the Department of Mysteries is responsible for upkeeping the statute of secrecy?" Harry asked curiously.
"It's one of their roles. They're researchers, essentially. Your mother could have joined, although she probably would have found the oaths required a tad restrictive.
Harry wondered who exactly decided the direction of what the Department of Mysteries researched. Brains in vats, time-magic, the veil. The only semi-normal thing the department did was store the prophecies, from what he knew. "Who funds them, who decides their research direction, and in whose service are they contractually?" he asked, curious as to why exactly the department was working on time magic if it was such a forbidden topic.
"All good questions," Filius said with a nod. "However, it's not called the Department of Mysteries for no reason. They're funded by the ministry, so taxes, essentially. I think they are generally trying to develop magic that would help society. However, that's all I know."
He seemed oddly blasé about a whole research squad committing who knew what sort of acts right in the ministry's basement, for god knew what purpose. Did wizards even have ethics committees? Where did the brains come from? He decided to put the topic out of his mind until he was at least as competent of a fighter as Alastor Moody. He already had a complicated life. He didn't need some sort of black technology researching government organisations shrouded in mystery after his ass.
Although… It would perhaps be interesting to go there at some point in an official fashion to get to know the methodology of magical researchers. The magical world didn't really have any universities, so he'd be stuck with either finding an apprenticeship or approaching one of these organisations after Hogwarts.
The elevator dinged and spat them out on the floor belonging to the Department of International Travel. It was oddly empty, only having some wizards running here and fro, and they looked like they worked here as well. Perhaps the emptiness underscored what Penny had told him a year ago in France, that magicals didn't often leave the country.
More likely, with the fact that portkeys were instantaneous and didn't need a waiting time to refuel or anything, there was no need for any delays or larger groups.
In the end, Harry didn't get enough information to decide which hypothesis was more likely, because even after Flitwick rang a bell at a desk, they still needed 30 minutes to get led into the portkey room. The portkey room wasn't anything special in itself, just one room in a corridor that seemed to go on forever and that was not warded against portkeys like the rest of the ministry, and other than the object which had been turned into a portkey, didn't have anything inside it.
In their case, it was a small rubber duck. Harry seriously suspected that the ministry had just stolen the thing from a muggle trash dump. He didn't have anything against recycling; he rather liked it, really. But… Teleporting half a continent away with a rubber duck was a bit lame. Sure, one man's rubber duck was another man's treasure, but surely they could have gotten a dragon's tooth or something. Or a taxidermied bear. That would have been pretty cool.
"Please grab onto the mysterious flotation device," the bored-looking young wizard from the department said, causing Harry and Flitwick to approach the portkey. The professor took out a miniature trunk from his pocket at that point and tapped it with his wand, returning it to normal size.
"Better safe than sorry," the man said upon receiving Harry's questioning look. He bent down to pick up the duck by its head, leaving Harry to grab onto the butt. Going by the small smile the professor was amused by that one.
"The portkey will be activating in, 10, 7, 15, 120, 2, 4, 87, 1, 90, 0," the transportation wizard announced with the far-away look of someone truly sick of their job.
Harry didn't have the time to consider what the seemingly random assortment of numbers meant before what felt like an anchor hooked itself into his navel and pulled him into the next dimension and into the duelling arc.
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AN: Dueling boutta start, sheesh we've had a long build up to this. I'm quite hyped, let's see how Harry fares against people more around his skill level.
Last chapter was pretty large, harry killing a horcrux with an unforgivable, so this one is a bit more chill to bring things down again, so they can go up a bit.