Chapter 10
Amelia Bones wanted to bang her head on her desk. Sirius Black had escaped Azkaban, and now according to the inheritance test that Manager Bloodclaws had shown her, he had been illegally incarcerated. She'd had every record of that particular time frame searched. There had been no trial. There had been no investigation. There had been no evidence collected. They'd taken a mad bit of rambling for a confession from a man who came from a family known for madness and thrown the man in prison. They hadn't even bothered to rubber stamp it.
Sirius Black had been practically a blood brother to James Potter. In fact, Amelia wasn't sure that they hadn't taken that oath. After all, according to Harry's inheritance test Black was his blood-adopted father as well as oathsworn godfather. The two men had been inseparable, both as boys and after they'd left Hogwarts, but thanks to the Black family's reputation no one had even bothered to look into the matter. Amelia had to wonder if Dumbledore had been behind that as well. The man's experiments with creating obscurus would have made little Harry Potter a tempting target, after all. There was no doubt that Vernon Dursley was an abuser, and the curses and potions on the aunt and cousin had made growing up in that house a misery, she had no doubt.
At least Amelia had been able to talk Fudge out of a Kiss on Sight order. That would have been a disaster all around, especially if Black was, as she suspected, the current Lord Black. Young Harry was listed as the heir to that House currently and Heir Malfoy had a closer blood connection than he did, save for the oaths and rituals tying Harry to Black as his personal heir.
There was no hope for it. She was going to have to talk with Fudge and lay out what a mess the last minister had left them in. Pointing out that he'd been taking advice from an unknown Dark Lord, that is to say Dumbledore, and a well known deatheater, that is to say Malfoy, and both of those associations would now spell a political death for him if he didn't do something like go back over the laws and imprisonments that took place that might have been influenced by those two men.
Yes, that was the way to do it. Get Fudge to tell the papers that due to the evidence that Dumbledore was a Dark Lord the ministry had begun to go over everything the man had a hand in. Then the news that Black hadn't had a trial could come out, and well SHE'd better have the investigation into the death of Lord and Lady Potter well in hand by then. With any luck she'd already have the real culprit in hand when it hit the papers. Oh Merlin! She'd better tell Harry what she'd learned. The last thing she wanted was to put that boy through anything more than he'd already been through.
---
Petunia straightened up her notes and turned to the boys. "Alright boys, now we've been told that each of us has a place in the castle - the founder's chambers. From what I understand, none of these rooms have been touched since the founders died. I think it would be an excellent idea if we could find these rooms, have a historian come in and investigate them and have a reporter on hand when they are opened so that we can show the public what's happening at Hogwarts now that we're in charge. So, I'd like you to go and try to find these chambers. Each of your rings should lead you to the rooms."
"I've already found Slytherin's chambers, Aunt Petunia. It's underneath the school, and the secret entrance is in the 2nd floor girls restroom," Harry said. "A ghost called Moaning Myrtle haunts it because that's where she died. Hagrid was expelled for keeping and letting lose the basilisk that did it, but he was framed. That came out a month or so ago when Ron and I found the chamber and I killed the basilisk inside and the enchanted diary that was forcing a student to use the basilisk to petrify students last year."
"Oh, that's not acceptable. Nolby!" Petunia called. Nolby popped in beside her, resplendent in his new uniform. "Oh that looks very good on you, Nolby. Now, have the elves responsible for construction to redo Moaning Myrtle's restroom. Turn it into a nice office for Harry. That way Myrtle can have a nice room to haunt and Harry can have access to the Slytherin chamber. No one should have to haunt a restroom for eternity." She turned to Harry. "We'll talk about you killing a basilisk later. I'm hoping that a real one isn't what I think it is."
"Um, probably it is what you think it is," Harry said uncomfortably. "But it was necessary to save Ginny Weasley's life and I'm ok. I'm having Manager Bloodclaws sell the carcass, but she thinks that we should have a reporter come in and take pictures of it before they start rendering it down. So, let me know when the reconstruction is done and I'll let the reporter and the Goblins down into the chamber."
"Alright, I can see that I have something else that I want to kill the color blind old goat for," Petunia huffed. "I won't take it out on you, Harry, but I want you to promise me that you will not go looking for dangerous animals, magical or not, until you are at least in your Sixth Year."
Harry didn't want to make that promise, but he did want to reassure his aunt that he wasn't a reckless idiot. "I promise I won't go looking for dangerous animals unless it is necessary," he compromised.
"I suppose that's the best I can get," Petunia said with a sigh. "Alright, go and take Professor Snape with you while you look for Griffindor's chambers."
"Yes, Aunt Petunia," Harry said and left the Headmistress' Office. At the foot of the stairs, next to the gargoyle, Harry found Snape waiting for him. The man looked better than he had earlier. Apparently, getting his aunt to accept his apology had settled him down. Not of course that Aunt Petunia forgave him, Harry knew. That would probably be a long time coming, but she had at least had accepted that, for the most part, Snape hadn't been in control of his actions. "I think we should go to the Chamber of Secrets first," Harry told him. "It's better to take care of Slytherin's business there."
"That would probably be a good idea," Snape sighed. "As much as I hate both of the old bastards, it wouldn't do for anyone to over hear us."
Harry agreed - with both statements. He led the way to the 2nd floor girls restroom, only to find the house-elves investigating the room and had already vanished the girl's loos. "ARE YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS! THEY'RE RUINING MY LOO!" screamed Moaning Myrtle.
"It's ok, Myrtle! They're not ruining the room, they're renovating it!" Harry explained hurriedly. "It's going to be a nice office now. Now you'll have a nice place to haunt and have visitors in. You couldn't have that before."
Myrtle sniffed.
Harry smiled and turned to the house-elves, who had all been eyeing the teen ghost with a bit of apprehension. "Now, over on that side, Myrtle needs something nice. I don't know anything about girls or girl ghosts, but please make it something nice. On the other side of the room, I need a desk, chairs and bookcases. Right here," and Harry touched the sink. "I need something snakey. I'm sure that you'll know what's best, but this is the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets and I need something to mark it for those who know where it is and something to hide it for those who have no business trying to get into it. Right now it's secured with a password in parseltongue."
"Yes, Lord Snakey!" said an eager elf, whose yellow hard hat was threatening to fall into his eyes.
Harry grinned at the cheek. He'd noticed that the Hogwarts elves were just as likely to give someone a nice nickname as a snarky one, and no one except the elf in question could tell which was which. "We're going down to the Chamber now, so we'll get out of your way." With that, Harry leaned over the sink and whispered, 'Open', in parseltongue.
To Snape's obvious astonishment the sink lowered into the floor revealing a slide down into the darkness below. "Could one of you come with us?" Harry asked the elves. "There's some structural damage down there, a cave in, that needs to be repaired."
"Does Lord Snakey want slide or stairs?" another elf asked, this one with a thick ponytail of dark hair under her hardhat. She was poking her finger at the surface of the slide, having leaned in to see where the slide went.
"Um, I didn't know it could do stairs," Harry said with a flush. "Stairs, please," he whispered in parseltongue again. This time the slide morphed into a set of stairs. "Thanks," he told the elf. He proceeded Snape and the elf down the stairs. At the bottom, amid the petrified, (by time rather than magic), old bones of rats and other animals, Harry led the way towards the Chamber itself.
"MERLIN AND MORGANA!" Snape yelped when the shed skin of the basilisk came into view.
"It's just a shed skin," Harry told him, and didn't see the horrified look that Snap shot at him. "The rockfall is just over here," he told the elf. Once they'd reached it, he informed the elf that because there were people who were going to have to be coming and going out of the area soon, he'd like to have the rock and the walls it had come out of to be nicely solid so not to scare anyone, or even worse, to have the fall happen again while there were people in the way.
Very soon the elf had an entrance cleared and Harry led Snape to the entrance to the Chamber itself. There he once again said open in parseltongue and the two proceeded into the Chamber. Harry ignored the basilisk corpse and moved over to one of the fallen pillars. There he sat himself down on the stone and gestured Snape to join him. He waited for Snape to unfreeze himself from where he was standing in shocked silence, staring at the corpse.
"You," Snape began, but lapsed into silence.
"Well, no one else was willing to do anything," Harry pointed out sourly. "The fewmets hauler knew where the tunnel entrance was and he did nothing. He hid it. Come to find out that his only worry was that the school might close, not that muggleborns might be hurt."
Snape sagged against the pillar next to Harry. "He only worried about his power base, color blind bastard."
"Ok, so I gave the deatheaters that are in Azkaban for life's lordships away to the families of those they hurt. Neville got the Lestrange's lordship and Molly Weasley picked out which of her kids got the lordships of the ones who killed her brothers. I thought that was appropriate." He pulled out the Prince lordship ring box. "I need help in dealing with the rest of them. I can't take over any of the Houses I inherited until I'm fifteen. I'm not even allowed to touch the vaults, except for my trust vault and my gift vaults. I don't even really want them, except that I don't want Tom to have any power base, wraith or not, the next time I have to face him."
Harry handed the Prince box to Snape. "This is yours. Turns out your grandfather didn't disinherit you, just your mom. The reason that you didn't get it when your grandfather died was because he didn't tell anyone and you didn't go to Gringotts to find out. I don't want it, and you deserve to have it. I only have it now because all of Moldy's followers swore vassal pledges to him. Bye the way, Hogwarts does not have any um, well we can't take any profit from whatever potions you make just because you're a professor. With having the assistants, one for each class and one for your head of house duties, you should have lots of time for experimenting and whatever else a potion master does."
"Brewing specific orders and trying to improve different potions mostly," Snape said absently, opening the box and looking at the Prince lordship ring. "A few try and come up with brand new potions." Harry reached over, took the ring out of the box and slipped it onto Snape's finger.
"What do I do about the kids, the other heirs I mean, here at school," Harry wanted to know. "How do I get rid of the idiots who liked being deatheaters and want the insane maniac back?"
Snape sighed, and rubbed his face with both of his hands. "You're such a Griffindor," the man complained. "You're still going to be trouble."
"Well, I think I was cursed to be a trouble magnet," Harry admitted. "It's not like I want to have stuff happen to me, but I've kind of given up the idea that I'm ever going to have a quiet year."
Snape looked over at the basilisk once more and shuddered again. "How did you not die?" Harry sighed and told him the story. He even pulled up his robe sleeve to show Snape his scar. "Dearest Merlin," Snape groaned. "Your mother is going to kill me when I cross over."
"Eh, blame it all on the wannabe Gandalf," Harry said with a shrug.
"Alright, let's start with Malfoy," Snape began.
---
Harry sighed as he finally got back to The Potter's Place. He was exhausted. He'd talked with Snape for a couple of hours on how to deal with the deatheaters, and then they'd gone looking for Griffindor's chambers, which had turned out to be a small tower that could only be seen from the Astronomy tower. It was accessed, strangely enough, from behind the teacher's table in the great hall. Snape had snarked that it looked like Griffindor hadn't been a morning person, because only a night owl would arrange his private quarters so that all he had to do was stumble down the stairs to get to breakfast.
Harry had agreed. They hadn't gone further than the first floor common area, but that was far enough. They could wait for the historian that Madam Longbottom was going to bring in. Harry had also asked her to look for cursebreakers and anyone who had studied art and book restoration. Who knew what was in those chambers, other than what legend had said? Just because Slytherin was rumored to be a nasty person didn't make it true, and the others could have collected things that were dangerous and simply put them behind security spells. Simply because someone had a reputation as a nice person did not mean that it was safe to go traipsing around their private rooms.
"Master Harry is home!" Dobby the house-elf sprung up practically beneath his nose.
"Argh, Dobby," Harry groaned. "Not so much enthusiasm, please. I'm wiped out." Harry had, just as he had promised his aunt, gone and invited Dobby to live with him. That was mostly because it made sure that Petunia wouldn't go looking for him, but also because he'd wanted to be certain that Dobby hadn't taken any harm in being freed from the Malfoy family. It had been Dudley who had told him that if a house-elf didn't have a family bond, or lived somewhere like Hogwarts with lots of ambient magical energy, the elf could die from a lack of magic. The last thing Harry wanted was to have accidentally killed Dobby in trying to free him, no matter the irony that would have been.
Harry and Dobby had gone through a very through bartering session once Harry had realized that Dobby had been trying to live off of what was essentially sips of magic from places like Hogwarts, only without any Human presence, magical or muggle, such as various stone circles like Stonehenge where ley lines interconnected. The Potter's Shed was located on a crossing of ley lines, and could support a rather large family of house-elves. The trouble was that Dobby, having been terribly abused for years, had no intention of ever being bound to a wizard again, not even Harry.
Harry honestly couldn't blame him. So they'd come to the agreement that Dobby would have access to the magic of The Potter's Shed and ten galleons a month in return for restoring the gardens, keeping the actual pottery works in good order, actually using the pottery works to produce various types of pottery by hand rather than magic, and keeping an eye on Harry for his Aunt Petunia. Harry had a vague idea of selling the pottery in the muggle world as it would not be a magical item, but at the moment it was simply a job to keep Dobby busy, and perhaps it would help him to calm down. Harry had heard of something called art therapy once. With any luck, this would help house-elves like it did humans.
"Master Harry did too much?" Dobby asked, wringing his hands.
"No, it's just been a long day," Harry reassured him. "Aunt Petunia had me working at Hogwarts today. All of the founders' personal chambers have been found and a bunch of interview have been done. I'm for bed."
"Make sure Master Harry eats dinner," Dobby scolded. Harry nodded and headed down to his flat. He was too tired to deal with Dobby, and could only be thankful that the elf was no longer trying to 'help' him. Dobby would probably try and force feed him if that was still the case. As it was, tonight was a night for a simple, no cooking snack before he fell into his hammock.