Luck of Nines

79

(An: so I'm just going to slink back as if I didn't disappear for like a month. Hi. -T. A.L.A. )

      Lost in his internal debate, Harry wandered through the halls, passingly silently by the many unused rooms which made up the family wing of the mansion- and with multiple of the several story wings making up just the main portion of the house, mansion was a fitting title indeed, if not a little underwhelming for the sheer size of the aging building.

The family wing he was still in had a separate set of wards on top of the ones that surrounded the entire mansion, just walking through the place as a welcomed guest and without focusing his senses at all he could feel them buzzing warningly in the back of his head, yet despite liveliness of the wards a thin layer of dust had settled over the surfaces. It was seemingly unused and wasting away as if it wasn't even frequented for cleaning or maintenance.

It made sense though, the building was giant and yet Harry rarely saw Theo go anywhere aside from four or five of the rooms which were all clustered together in the newest addition to the mansion.

      In the family wing there were a handful of other bedrooms and some libraries, a dueling room, as well as scattered throughout several play rooms, but overall nothing interesting.  Only one of the rooms stood out as anything different; the only one still visibly in use. 

      Harry had no idea what was inside, it was a locked room with an alarm spell set on the door, similar to the spell left on the room which he had just exited; except that one hadn't been locked. 

His curiosity was peaked, it wasn't common for there to be locked doors in the empty house, the only other one he knew of was Theo's laboratory, a place he didn't intend to revisit as it was a drafty, dark, stone room in the basement without any windows, real or fake, to offer at least some semblance of comfort. 

He held a small bit of doubt that this locked room was the only one in which Theo still regularly frequented, since he had yet to explore the whole wing, but the scent trail didn't branch off at all as he tracked it through the halls and back to the staircase, just went straight to and from the room, multiple tracks with varying ages all followed the same path. There was one semi-fresh trail, but it seemed to have declined in use the past few months.

      Ultimately, he pushed aside his curiosity at what was behind the locked door and the room was left unexplored. 

If it was locked, he wouldn't intrude without a reason- a lesson he'd learned in the Slytherin dorms which he figured he should still respect here.   Besides, he'd always suspected that Theo had a bedroom attached to his office since he always seemed to sleep in the room on the other side of it, but perhaps this was his real bedroom and Theo just didn't always sleep there or was really busy lately. 

       Lazily, his tail flicking and paws nearly silent, he meandered through the empty, faded rooms of the house gazing upwards at the frozen portraits- the magic that once animated then held hostage by a multitude of spells rendering them inert, forever frozen in that moment, incapable of leaving their frame and spying on the Nott household, assumably unaware of their surroundings. He wondered if that assumption was true.

      Theo would probably know, whether or not he was the one who cast the spell, he would find it important to be aware of the eyes watching and minds knowing his habits and actions. 

       Slowly his path drew him back to the ground floor, crossing the large, looming and carefully decorated entry halls and various sitting and ballrooms made to entertain guests with displays of power through wealth and influence- finally a fact of humanity Harry mostly understood.