Here We Go

chapter 4

Chapter 4: Hogwarts Express

Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale. There will provably be changes in the first hour or so as I find things that didn't come out the way I wanted.

NB: Mature concepts are described in this chapter, not actions.

While Harry would have liked to spend the time up until they went to Hogwarts learning about his family's history at Potter Manor, most of his time was actually spent under Gringotts, being pushed to learn enough of the goblin magic and physical skills that Gringott, Ulfr and Snorri believed he needed to know to look after himself and the girls, also learning elf magic from Efa and Emry and improving his Occlumency and Legilimency skills to protect himself against Dumbledore and Snape and get things out of them. Luna, Daphne and Astoria were staying there and training too and Efa popped Hermione in to join the training whenever she could, because she, Luna, Daphne and Astoria had been accepted by the Goblin Nation as the pre-mates of the blood adopted son of the Gringott family, as well as the mistresses by the Potter elves and familiars (they had all bonded with Mngwa familiars within a week or so), and Dora, Susan and Neville were condoned by the goblins and familiars as the guests of Grand Clan Chief Gringott and the master and mistresses' friends.

Harry went to Little Hangleton to help the curse breakers get past the parseltongue portions of the wards on the Gaunt cottage to retrieve the Peverell ring that Voldemort had made into a horcrux. There was a benefit... no two… three…. four! benefits accruing from this. The first was that the curse breakers were taking the horcruxes seriously now, the palpable evil of that thing and the almost unbeatable compulsion to put it on had been a major eye opener for them because they hadn't dealt with anything like that before. The second was that his contribution to getting through the wards like that had earned him an open offer to come along and learn from them. The third was that they'd replaced Riddle's father's bones in the graveyard there with a transfigured sheep skeleton in case the Death Eaters ever tried to revive their master again with the same ritual …. and the fourth and most important was that they recovered one of the more elusive horcruxes.

They also went to 12 Grimmauld Place, the Black Townhouse in London that had been Sirius' family's home since his parents were married, to recover the Slytherin locket that had been made into another horcrux, the one which Sirius' younger brother Regulus had replaced with a fake and hidden from Voldemort in a final act of redemption. Once they had retrieved the locket to destroy the horcrux, Sirius and Andi let go some of their anger at Sirius' mother's treatment of them by ceremonially burning her portrait, though Andi told Sirius that he'd cheapened the moment by pissing on the portrait as it burned. With that done, and army of elves and goblins came in to remove all the dark objects from the house (which left it rather empty) and then refurbish it as a light, airy and comfortable home. Angela directed their efforts in this, because the Black Townhouse would be her home once they were done at Hogwarts. Kreacher fought them at first, but Sirius making the effort to treat him civilly at Harry and Hermione's urging and the removal of all the dark objects that had been tainting the very atmosphere was changing him too.

The Potter and Black elves moved the magical paintings from the corridor in Hogwarts where the Room of Requirements was to similar corridors elsewhere in the castle for long enough for Harry to slip in and recover the Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw without Dumbledore realising that they'd been there, or what the Room of Requirements really was. When Harry explained why they did this the adults were furious, because none of them had had any inkling that the paintings had been spying on everyone at Hogwarts and reporting back to the Headmaster, the consensus of opinion was that while the magical paintings had of course been there since the Thirteenth Century, this widespread use of them to spy for the Headmaster was something that quite likely only began after Albus Bloody Dumbledore became Headmaster. They'd also moved other magical paintings around the castle, so while some of the paintings were confused because they knew that something had happened when they were moved back to where they came from, none of them could quite work out what. The important thing was that they now had all the horcruxes except for the one that had been in Harry's head if Dumbledore had been correct when he pontificated that Nagini hadn't been made into a horcrux as yet, and logic said he probably was. While they didn't want to destroy them yet in case it tipped him off, this meant that once they'd captured Voldemort's current host and secured him so that he couldn't escape, they would destroy the horcruxes and then the host, so Voldemort would be gone for good!