The Anti-Heroine || A Harry Potter Fanfiction

Chapter LXXVI

CHAPTER LXXVI:

Harry's POV:

Number Twelve Grimmauld Place was exactly as its name advertised; a grim, old place. Harry Potter had only been living confined within its walls for two and a half days and he already hated it.

It wasn't the house itself that he hated, surprisingly enough– despite his first impression of it as filthy, rundown and honestly only fit for a good few bombardas, and possibly a muggle bulldozer or two, beneath all the gloom and grime it was actually quite interesting. Underneath the dust and cobwebs, he was quite certain that the chandeliers and candelabras, all carved in the likeness of serpents, were made of real silver, not steel or brass, the wooden panelling had once been of excellent quality, the peeling wallpaper looked to be tastefully decorative under the mouldy discolouration and the filthy rugs and carpets were a silk and wool blend. With proper attention, Harry was pretty sure Grimmauld Place could be restored to its former heights of grandeur– and, of course, with the help of a good deal of magic and money too.

But it wasn't just the bare bones of former glory that made Grimmauld Place so interesting; it was what it held within its decrepit walls. There was a library lined with hundreds of books (and Harry was pretty sure that Dumbledore had already gone through it and taken out any obviously Dark ones, but there were plenty of Grey Magic books he'd left behind), there was a drawing room that at one time must have been exquisite and was still filled with all sorts of magical artefacts as well as an entire wall covered with a tapestry of the Black family tree, and a wildly overgrown backyard filled with all sorts of terrifying, man-eating and rare, poisonous flora and fauna.

So the house was interesting, tolerable even, but its current inhabitants? They were not "tolerable". They were the furthest fucking thing from "tolerable". And that was where all the hate came in.

Tonks and Charlie were a godsend (though he didn't really think he should be inflating Voldemort's ego like that, considering who had ordered them both to join the Order of the Phoenix), but they were only two people of an organisation of Dumbledore-worshipping vigilantes who treated him with the height of suspicion.

It had taken Harry exactly three minutes to get into an argument after arriving at the Order's "Headquarters"– Molly Weasley had tried assigning him Sirius Black's old bedroom to sleep in, much to his horror, and it had taken him snapping at her that Grimmauld Place was actually his house, thank you very much, to get her to stop pushing. They'd eventually all settled for him staying in Regulus Black's old bedroom, which neither Mrs Weasley or Dumbledore had been happy about, but they couldn't argue about it either considering Harry was right about owning the house.

Regulus Black's room was on the topmost of four floors, which Harry liked as spending his school year down in the Slytherin common room, under the Lake, could sometimes get a bit claustrophobic. He knew Hermione also got tense about being underground, after a few months passed by. It had been worse in their first year, when her claustrophobia had been more severe– a result of being locked in a small, windowless room by the nuns running the orphanage when she was a small child. She was growing out of that fear, but there were times when it just got to be too much for her, and a childhood living in a cupboard under the stairs meant that it sometimes got too much for him too.

The topmost floor of Grimmauld Place only had two rooms– Sirius Black's bedroom and Regulus's. Charlie had ended up being the one to move into Sirius Black's room– Tonks had her own apartment in Britain already, so she wasn't moving into Grimmauld Place. There was a sign on the door of Regulus's bedroom– "Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black"– and Harry could tell that the room had once been beautiful, with its carved wooden headboard on the bed, velvet curtains, and fine wall hangings and furniture. His later explorations of Grimmauld Place revealed to him that Regulus's room was in slightly better condition than most of the house, which he couldn't deny made him feel smug.