Chapter 5
“Where’d you get that ring, Harry?” Hermione asked the following Monday. After Tom made his choice of magical guardian and real guardian, both Severus and he looked over the Potter properties available, to see which one would be perfect for them to use as their base of operations. In order to keep Severus from getting into hot water with the headmaster, Tom decided to go ahead with his plans to have the Malfoys foster him whilst Severus took time during the weekends to get the new Dark lair up and running. The release of the magical blocks had increased Tom’s power exponentially; he now had more magic at his fingertips at thirteen than he’d ever had performing all of those arcane rituals in his previous youth.
The Dark Lord looked at the beaten silver band on his left ring finger, the onyx stone gleaming mellowly in the torchlight. It was the Peverell ring with the resurrection stone, reworked to be unrecognizable to the old man, and it was also a horcrux that Riddle intended to keep on him to protect it. He figured that Dumbledore probably knew what he’d done whilst he was still a student, after studying the diary in Harry’s second year, so he was taking absolutely no chances with either his life, or the boy’s. “It was in my vault,” the raven haired teen replied after several weighted moments. “I went to the goblins over the weekend to get an accounting of my inheritances, and this was the only piece of jewelry that was appealing to me.”
“Did professor Dumbledore say you could go to Gringotts?” the bushy haired know-it-all asked snidely. “He is your magical guardian, after all, and he’s the only one who can give you permission to leave the school.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Granger,” came an obnoxious voice from behind them, where they were sitting at the Gryffindor table. “Potter and I had an interesting discussion in that classroom last week, and my father and mother have successfully petitioned for guardianship of him, to get him away from those abusive muggles. As it is, with his great-grandmum being Dorea Black, Mother has more right to foster him than anyone else in the magical world.”
“His aunt is Lily Potter’s sister and direct blood kin, Malfoy,” the girl rejoined snootily, nose in the air. “She has more right to take care of Harry than your mother does.”
“Once again, you’re wrong,” Theo Nott added his two cents’ worth. Draco had taken his very best friends aside and explained what had happened, and everyone was fully on board with protecting their Lord from the machinations of the headmaster as long as Riddle had to stay in the school. “Ministry law states that if a magical orphan has magical relatives willing to raise him or her, then those magical relatives are preferred over anyone muggle. Since the Malfoys have blood ties with Potter, their petition would take precedence over the muggles.”
“Which means,” Voldemort said flatly, “that I can finally escape my abusers and live with people who actually want me. Unless, of course, you think it’s okay to be persistently starved and beaten.”
“You’re just saying that to get undeserved attention, mate,” Ron barked from down the table, spraying his table mates with the crumbs from his scones. “You’re lying about their treatment of you, and you need to stop that.”
“So you and the twins needing to rescue me in my second year was a lie?” Harry asked lowly, emerald eyes narrowed angrily at the redhead. Harry had been hammering on Tom’s consciousness, wanting to be involved with this part of the conversation. He’d grown sick of the two idiot Gryffindors diminishing his treatment to anyone who’d overheard their conversations, and he wanted to have it out, in public, once and for all.
“No, it wasn’t a lie,” came a welcome voice from down the table as Fred and George joined the chat. “We took Dad’s flying car to Surrey to check on Harry, to make sure he was okay,” Fred continued as he looked at everyone. At the head table, Dumbledore was frantically trying to make his way to the Gryffindor table to stop the conversation before too much was revealed, but McGonagall had an iron grip on his arm and was glaring something awful at him.
“He hadn’t written for quite a while and we were starting to get worried,” George picked up the narrative. “We got there and found bars on his bedroom window, and Hedwig was locked up in her cage, which was why we weren’t getting anything from him.”
“We used the car and some rope to pull the bars off of the window so we could get Harry out,” Fred told everyone, glaring angrily at the old man, who had his head buried in his hands as information he didn’t want known was being revealed. “Harry said he’d been locked up in there since the beginning of summer, and hadn’t eaten in four days. Hedwig was looking a little weak and we got even more worried.”
“We were trying to get him to crawl out the window and into the car, but he told us that his trunk was locked up in the cupboard underneath the front stairs,” George continued, eyes hard. “He asked us to go get it, and we were able to pick the lock on the bedroom door in order to get down to the cupboard. We picked the lock on that, too, and leaned in to get his things.”
“On the wall above a thin baby mattress on the floor was a drawing of a birthday cake in purple crayon that said ‘Happy Birthday Harry’,” Fred whispered, blue eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “There was more writing on a different wall that said ‘Hary’s room’, and we knew that this cubby was where they kept him for most of his childhood. We hurried back upstairs and got into the car with Hedwig in her cage, and Harry had just crawled out and was almost in the car when his fat uncle came barreling into the room and grabbed his legs.”
“It was a tug of war between us and that fat bastard, but we were finally able to pull Harry into the car and we escaped with him,” George finished. The Great Hall was deathly silent as every single student in the room was listening with breathless fascination to the story. “Of course, as soon as we got back home, Mum screamed blue murder at us, and wouldn’t even listen to us when we tried to tell her what those muggles were doing to Harry. The bars from the window are still in Dad’s shed, if the DMLE wants to investigate.”
“GOOD FOR YOU!” someone shouted from the Ravenclaw table, and that set everyone off into cheers and shouts for the twins’ heroics in rescuing their Savior. Harry blushed to the roots of his dark hair, retreating back into his mind and letting Riddle out front to take the brunt of attention now focused on him and his rescuers. Some of the professors were standing and shouting, trying to get control of the situation, but it took a concussive charm, sending a rolling wave of sound through the hall, to finally get the students to quiet down.
“Mr. Potter, I would like to see you in my office immediately,” Dumbledore growled as he passed the teen, on his way up to his domain. The anger the old man was exuding could be felt throughout the entire hall as eyes followed the old man until he disappeared. Tom took a leisurely bite of his English muffin, before starting on his scrambled eggs and bacon.
“Aren’t you going up to see the headmaster?” Granger queried, shaking the raven haired teen’s arm a little impatiently. “He wants you up there right away.”
“He can wait until I’ve had my breakfast,” the teen snapped angrily, yanking his arm from her claw-like hand. “I may have had to starve at my relatives’ house, but I won’t go hungry here.” The chatter in the hall was subdued as the other tables whispered about Potter’s living situation, but everyone went quiet when the post owls flew in, dropping newspapers and letters all around the hall. One owl landed in front of Hermione, and she eagerly took the missive, giving the bird a piece of sausage, which it accepted before flying away. She tore open the envelope, eyes scanning the letter eagerly, and was completely stunned when the missive disappeared from her fingers, almost as if someone had cast a summoning charm on it. Turning, cinnamon eyes filled with rage, she opened her mouth to screech at her friend.
“How dare you take my letter like that?! It’s mine and it’s personal, and you’ll give it back right this instant!”
“Dear Hermione,” Voldemort read aloud as he danced away from her reaching hands. “How are you doing, darling? I’m so glad to hear that you’re getting the best marks in your classes, and that you’re even above people who’d been born and raised in that world. I told you you were extraordinary. Now you keep up the hard work, and you’ll reap all the rewards you deserve for your brilliance. Your father has…” The letter was snatched away by a seething witch, who was glaring at Harry as if she wanted to eviscerate him with her bare hands. “Now you know how it feels when someone butts into your personal life. Take this as the warning it is and stop trying to get into my personal business. If you need to know whatever it is I learn, or whatever it is I receive from outside, I’ll tell you. Until then, mind your own damn business!”
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“That...ah...that was quite interesting, Harry,” Severus murmured to the Dark Lord. Voldemort had asked Severus to accompany him to the headmaster’s office, and they were on their way up the many, many staircases. “I daresay she might be able to curtail her overwhelming need to know everything about you, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“Yeah,” Harry replied as he stepped forward. “I could feel Tom’s fury building, so I figured to just sit back and watch what he’d do. I just get so sick and tired of being expected to share all my secrets with them, but don’t receive the same courtesy in return. I know they have private meetings with the headmaster, and I’m kind of worried about what and why they need to speak to each other so often.”
“We’ll work on getting a couple of spies into the office when they all meet, so we can prepare for whatever Albus has up his garishly colored sleeve. Now, are you going to stay forward for the meeting?”
“He’s already gone, Severus,” Riddle said as they rounded the corner to ascend the last set of stairs. “I’ve built him a very comfortable living space in my mind so that he can hide away there and feel safe. It’s hidden behind my occlumency barriers, and no one will be able to reach him.”
“It’s hard to reconcile wanting to protect him with the urge to terminate him,” Severus suddenly said. “His father was very nasty to me whilst we were in school, and I was eager to take out my anger on him the last two years, but he’s nothing like his father was.”
“How could he be, Severus?” Tom asked incredulously. “He had fifteen months with his parents, and couldn’t have formed any sort of impressions from such a small amount of time with them. He was tossed aside by the headmaster; a puppet to pull out when the time was right, and when he gets here, he’s treated like an exotic zoo exhibit. When was he supposed to develop that arrogance and sense of entitlement, when, in the muggle world, he was treated like a cockroach that no one could kill, and in this world like a god come to earth?”
The pair finally reached the gargoyle, which hadn’t returned to its guard position, so the older man and teen ascended the moving spiral staircase, the younger before the older, and stepped into the office when they reached the top. “I wanted to speak with you alone, Mr. Potter,” Albus grumbled churlishly.
“Mr. Potter asked me to accompany him, headmaster,” Severus replied for the teen. “He’s not sure what he’s done to piss you off, and he’s wary of how you’ll express that anger.”
“My boy,” the old man said, shocked, “I would never hurt you. You’re like a beloved grandson to me.”
“I don’t know that, sir,” Voldemort replied, just the right amount of wariness in his voice. “Other people who claim a familial relationship with me have hurt me. Why should you be different?”
“Fair enough,” Dumbledore said with a wince. “I’d like to talk to you about what had been said in the Great Hall this morning. Now I know that you and I have had this discussion before, but I would like to caution you on over-exaggerating your relatives’ discipline of you. Surely you don’t wish to damage their reputations with their neighbors and your uncle’s employer.”