[From Litha to Lammas]: Forget-Me-Not, Harry/Theodore Nott, R, 5/7

[lomonaaeren]

Part Four.

Title: Forget-Me-Not (5/7)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: AU (Harry is not the Boy-Who-Lived), socially awkward Harry, angst, present tense, violence
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 7200
Summary: AU. Harry isn’t the Boy-Who-Lived, but his parents still died, and Albus Dumbledore, concerned that Death Eaters might seek the boy’s death, cast a powerful charm on him to make wizards ignore him before Harry was left with the Dursleys. Except, with the Elder Wand in play, the charm was far too powerful, and made others essentially forget Harry existed when not directly interacting with him. Sorted into Ravenclaw at Hogwarts, Harry lives a contented life with no one either loving or hating him…until the charm breaks on his seventeenth birthday, and he’s suddenly plunged directly into the middle of a living world at war.
Author’s Notes: This is obviously a major AU, as you can see from the summary, and also one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This will have seven parts, to be posted over the next seven days.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Five

Harry straightens up from the shaky Apparition-he attended the lessons they all did in Hogwarts during their sixth year, but he never had to apply them before-and stares around the dusky field. There’s long grass in every direction, bowing beneath the dark wind, beneath the stars.

“Harry.”

Harry turns abruptly, his wand in his hand. He hates being seen. But probably less when the person watching him has a faint smile on their face and all of the smile in their eyes, the way Nott does. He has a Lumos Charm on the wand in his hand, so that Harry can see his face more easily.

“Thank you for coming.” Nott cants his head in what is probably the direction of a distant house. “Will you follow me?”

Harry nods slowly and does so, aware of the way that Nott’s gaze remains on him, as if he assumes that he has to fill in all his “lost” memories right now. “I’m not going to put you in danger, am I? I suspected your father was a Death Eater.”

“I have my own house.” Nott’s voice grows clipped for a second. “He grew so angry when he couldn’t force me to take the Dark Mark last summer that it was necessary.”

“And you had a spare house lying around?”

Nott smiles when Harry glances at him, looking as if he was waiting for the glance to give the smile. “Not in the sense you mean. There was a property that my grandfather owned which he willed to my father’s firstborn child. My father’s never been able to alter the will or the terms of the bequest.”

Harry nods. He comes over the top of a hill and sees a cottage ahead of them, complete with brick walls and what looks like an ivy-entwined fence around it. He can’t make out much more than that from this distance, but he relaxes. It looks like a big enough place to make a little space of his own, which is all he really wants.

“I apologize for how small it is.”

“No, I mean, it’s fine,” Harry says, rolling his shoulders with his discomfort as once again Nott looks at him. “Before this, I spent my summers in a room at the Leaky Cauldron that I made the barkeep forget about. Sharing a house with one person is going to be something of a luxury.”

Nott comes to a stop, tilting his head. “And are you going to explain to me how you managed that? I thought it was only you that people forgot about when they weren’t looking at you.”

Harry studies him. “If you’re really interested, sure, I can do that. Not that I know that much about my protective magic or why it disappeared today.”

“Today’s your seventeenth birthday, isn’t it?”

“How did you know that?” Harry is no longer surprised that people have memories him now, as depressing as it is, but his birthday isn’t common knowledge.

“My father thought it was a good idea to keep detailed records about his enemies. Or people he thought of as enemies. I stole some of them when I left to set up my own house. He wrote down details about your parents, and that you were born on July 31st, 1980.”

“All right. But I don’t see what that has to do with my protective magic disappearing.”

Nott smirks a little, as if he thinks that Harry’s incredibly dim. Harry just goes on staring at him, waiting for him to come out with it, and finally Nott does. “You’re of age. The protective magic was probably placed on you as a child to help you survive. It makes sense that it would vanish when you legally became an adult in the wizarding world.”

Harry curses softly. That makes a lot more sense than some of the answers that he tried to come up with. And of course, whoever cast that spell on him was probably planning to be there to protect him themselves, and couldn’t have anticipated how attached Harry would grow to the protective magic.

“Come on, then. There’s no sense in standing outside the house.”

Harry follows Nott into the cottage. It’s a nice enough place, he supposes. The walls are paneling instead of stone, and there are several (still) paintings of landscapes and one of a dragon in flight. The floor is stone, covered with thick rugs in shades of red and black and silver, and Nott shows him the staircase that leads up to the bedrooms.

Harry yawns. He does want to sleep; Tom woke him up far too early this morning. But he also wants to tell Nott one thing that might affect whether he’s willing to house Harry.

“Can you feel what this is?” he asks, and takes the Horcrux diary out of his pocket, unwrapping the silk from it.

Nott has a polite look on his face until Harry unwraps the silk fully, and then he stumbles back as he gets up from the chair. He’s breathing hoarsely, his pupils standing out as he stares at Harry.

“What the fuck is that? I’ve never felt anything so Dark in my life. Except once, and then-” He cuts himself off.

Harry nods. “I know. This belongs to Voldemort.” He rolls his eyes as Nott hisses at him. “Relax, I can-” And then he curses. Right, the protective magic that made people ignore him is gone. “Are the rumors about him putting a Taboo on his name true?”

“As far as I know,” Nott grinds out. He’s still staring at Harry as if wondering what venomous kind of snake he’s invited into his home.

Harry sighs. “Fine. I’ll call him That Bastard. This belongs to That Bastard. It’s called a Horcrux. One of the seven anchors that he’s using to hold on to life,” he adds, because Nott shows no signs of recognizing the word. “From what I’ve heard by eavesdropping on Dumbledore and Longbottom, they need to destroy the Horcruxes before they can destroy That Bastard. But they didn’t figure out a way to do that before Dumbledore died. I performed a ritual that showed me where all the Horcruxes were, using this one as a beacon. At least one of them is in Dumbledore’s office, so they had two at one point, but they didn’t destroy either one.”

“How did you get this one?”

Nott’s voice is more strangled than ever now, but Harry doesn’t know if that’s down to the definition of a Horcrux, or that Harry has one, or that there are seven, or something else. “I sneaked into the Headmaster’s office to grab it when the Death Eaters came to Hogwarts. I thought that they might find it and take it. It was there because it was possessing some girl in our second year and making her Petrify the students.”

Nott puts his hand over his eyes. “And you know how to destroy them?”

“No. That was something I was hoping to research, actually. If you have access to a good library? Can you sneak books over from your father’s house?”

“I have some. And the rune means that I can go into the house and sneak more out, as long as he isn’t there. I’ll have to look.” Nott leans forwards. “But I want to hear more about this ritual that you said used this book as a beacon.”

Harry frowns. That’s the part that interested him, or made him react with exasperation? Strange. But then again, Harry supposes that he ought to spread the knowledge of what the Horcruxes are around so that someone can retrieve them if Longbottom dies in his insane quest to destroy them, which seems likely.

“All right. I surrounded the diary with a circle of runes designed to suppress its Dark magic, as otherwise it reaches out. Then I surrounded that with a second circle that used the position of the stars in the midsummer sky to imbue the runes with power, and I used spokes to channel the magic, and-”

“You can use Astronomy with Runes?”

“Er, yes.” Harry eyes Nott. “I thought you did pretty well with Astronomy. Better than me, anyway. I had to do a solid week of research before I figured out which constellations and specific stars I should target. Why don’t you know this?”

Nott leans back and shakes his head. “Listen. You belong in Ravenclaw. I don’t know half the things you know, and I don’t even fully understand the description of the ritual. You created this ritual?”

“Based on other rituals.” Harry thinks he can see where this is going, now, and he wants to head it off. “So that means-”

“It means that you’re incredible,” Nott says, and there’s what Harry didn’t want to see, the look of someone being impressed with him. People who are impressed with him might want to use him, and he no longer has the protective magic to deflect their interest. “And you’re better with Runes than anyone I’ve even heard of.”

Harry does preen then, a little, because that skill is the one that he most wanted praised, and it’s not the same as when Nott was thanking him for the protection rune, something that only benefited him.

Harry abruptly sits up. Why didn’t he think of that before? It’ll involve a lot of research and probably redoing the rune circles he bears on his body, but he can resurrect the protective magic! He just needs to find the runes to do it.

“What did you just think of?”

“A way to start hiding again,” Harry says. He doesn’t see any harm in telling Nott. Their debts are paid back, and as long as he can stay here and have access to books, then things ought to be all right. Now that he thinks of it, Nott is less likely to betray him than many other people, given that he’s benefited from Harry’s skill already.

Nott’s face shuts down for a second. Then he stands. “You said something about being tired?”

Harry didn’t, he just yawned, but he stands. “And you don’t mind helping me engage in research to destroy the Horcruxes?”

Nott draws his wand. “If you’ll trust me to put a ward around that thing, I might know something we could do right now.”

Harry perks up at once. The diary is malevolent enough that he hasn’t been happy carrying it around, but leaving it someplace for Death Eaters to find and take back to their master wouldn’t have worked, either. “What’s that?”

“Fiendfyre.” Nott looks him straight in the eye. “I can control it, I promise.”

“Let’s try it,” Harry says at once. He’s heard of Fiendfyre, but not even in the books in the Restricted Section included the incantation, and he wasn’t about to try casting or imitating it when he didn’t know the spell. He glances around. “Should we be doing this outside? Do you want to burn down the house and build another one?”

Nott sighs. “A containment ward based on the rune that you gave me is already around the house, which is why I had to give you the Apparition coordinates some distance away. And I know how to cast that ward on a miniature scale.” He raises his wand and twists it in several flourishes through the air. Harry watches, and can make out a familiar corkscrew shape and another one that looks like an open lotus blossom.

“Did you base that on some of the images from The Book of Six Wizards?”

Nott twitches, and the ward spirals away from his wand and settles around the diary like a piece of string. The book immediately begins to buck, but the magic it emits falls back every time it approaches the boundary of the containment ward. “You’re a bloody genius.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to distract you.”

“You’re just a genius, that’s all.” Nott studies him for long enough that Harry feels he has to nod to the Horcrux, but then Nott nods and turns back to the book. “Fiendfyre!”

Harry’s mouth falls open as a tornado of flames blasts away from the end of Nott’s wand. That’s it? There’s no incantation because it’s just the name of the spell?

He feels cheated.

But then the fire lands on the Horcrux, and he doesn’t feel cheated at all by the scream that erupts from the diary. There’s something black in the middle of all that red and gold that’s struggling to get away and envelop the air in between them, but the Fiendfyre concentrates around the book and forces the spirit, or the shade, back into it, and then there’s a sudden explosion.

Harry flinches despite himself, but realizes in time that the containment ward will hold back the explosion from him. Nott gives him a disappointed look anyway. Apparently Harry should trust in his expertise if Nott trusts in his.

“Sorry,” Harry mutters, shrugging as he studies the last remains of the book before the ward moves in on the Fiendfyre at a gesture of Nott’s wand and squeezes it out of existence. “That was brilliant.”

Nott flushes for some reason, before he turns away abruptly and walks towards the staircase. “You’re ready to sleep, then?”

“Yes, fine,” Harry says, and follows Nott, both tired and satisfied to the bone. At least one Horcrux is gone, and in the morning, he can write Longbottom about the others and hopefully turn the quest over to him.

There’s the small fact that one of the Horcruxes seems to be Longbottom himself, but, well, that’s not really Harry’s problem. And maybe Longbottom can take a bath in Fiendfyre with a special runic circle or something, and have the flames just destroy the Horcrux in him, instead of his body.

Harry falls asleep trying to construct that kind of runic circle in his head.

*

“Is this your owl, Harry?”

Harry’s mouth falls open when he comes around the corner into the breakfast nook of the cottage, and not because Merlin found him. Harry used him to send a message to Nott once, after all.

No, it’s because Merlin is sitting on Nott’s arm and letting Nott scratch his head.

“That’s my traitor owl,” Harry agrees, sitting down on the other side of the table and doing his best not to jump when sausage and eggs appear in front of him, joined a moment later by tea and pumpkin juice and porridge and scones and marmalade. Nott must have house-elves. Harry isn’t used to them outside Hogwarts. “He apparently likes everyone but me.”

Merlin turns his head away with a genteel hoot, and lets Nott go on scratching him. Harry rolls his eyes and starts eating.

“He’s a beauty,” Nott says. “Perhaps you don’t treat him right.” He laughs as Merlin bobs his head in an exaggerated fashion, but he doesn’t get to give Merlin sausages. Instead, Merlin launches himself from Nott’s arm and flies straight at Harry, making him duck, before he lands on the table next to him and hisses. Harry feeds him some meat in resignation, and then starts putting marmalade on a scone. The greedy owl can’t resist, but then he’ll get his beak stuck shut for a while and stop bothering Harry.

“I’m glad he’s here, anyway,” Harry says, when Merlin is indeed struggling with the marmalade and Harry has had peace enough to eat some scrambled eggs. “I need to send a letter to Longbottom.”

Nott gives him a cool look, rather like Merlin when he thinks Harry’s done something stupid. “Why would you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Harry asks, and swallows another bite. “He’s one of the Horcruxes. It’s polite to tell him before attempting to destroy them, I would reckon. And besides, I hope that he’ll take over the task of hunting them. He might know better about where they are than we do, anyway.”

“A living being cannot be a Horcrux.”

“I think you would have said until yesterday that no one could create multiple Horcruxes, either.”

Nott opens his mouth, then closes it. “Good point. What were the others you saw?”

Harry outlines the Horcruxes he saw and what he could tell of their locations, including sketching the family crest on the cabinet that the locket was in. Nott has moved his chair around the table to sit next to Harry by the time the elves bring some parchment for the sketch, which Harry isn’t sure is necessary, but-

Sometimes he remembers the way Nott kissed him and gets a bit flustered. It’s better to concentrate on the sketch.

“That’s the Black family,” Nott says, sitting back with a frown. “There’s only a few of them left. Your godfather Sirius Black died with your parents. His father and his brother died before he did, and his mother a few years after. His cousin Bellatrix Lestrange is in prison-”

“The same Lestrange who killed Neville’s parents and participated in killing mine?” Harry interrupts.

Nott blinks at him, then shakes his head. “That’s right. I almost forgot that Rabastan Lestrange is supposed to have escaped in our third year.”

“Did escape. He showed up at the school with some kind of plan to resurrect That Bastard. I stopped him.”

Nott blinks hard at him, then says, “Somehow you managed to leave that out of what you’ve told me of your adventures so far.”

Harry shrugs a little. It isn’t like it’s the cleverest thing he’s ever done. “But I have to admit that I don’t know what happened to him after that. He escaped, but I never heard how. Just that some sympathizer freed him.”

“How close were the Lestranges to the Dark Lord?”

“Uh, I think you would know that better than I would.”

Nott’s eyes shine in annoyance for a second, but then he nods. “Fair enough. Yes, from what my father said, they were close in the first war. But the Dark Lord never freed them from Azkaban, or maybe he didn’t have the people to do that. And Rabastan Lestrange was jealous of his older brother and sister-in-law, from what he said. He probably wouldn’t try to do it, either.”

Harry has been thinking about something else, about Longbottom’s suspicions of Malfoy dropping the diary in the red-haired girl’s cauldron. “Do you think that the Lestranges might have been close enough to That Bastard to receive a Horcrux?”

Nott catches a sharp breath. “Maybe. Bellatrix was a Black before she married. Do you think it’s the locket?”

Harry shakes his head a little. “That one is just sitting in a cabinet. The Lestranges probably don’t have anything like that left, do they? But there might be a shut-up Black house somewhere that does.”

“If that’s the case, then you have the best chance of anyone of getting to it.”

Harry narrows his eyes, not least because Nott sounds pleased about that. “What do you mean?”

“Sirius Black was your godfather. Didn’t you think he might have left you something?”

“What kind of legacy is a Horcrux locket?”

“Oh, come on, Harry, I doubt he knew about that. But maybe he left you the cabinet, or the house where the cabinet is. It would explain why the locket has remained undisturbed all these years, instead of seeking out someone to try and poison like that book.”

Harry pauses. “I don’t know. No one ever came and told me anything about that. I had enough trouble getting the Potter money the first time I went to Diagon Alley. It was hard to get the goblins to pay attention to me.” He wonders idly why the protective magic worked on the goblins but doesn’t seem to work on owls and cats. Maybe it just has to do with the relative level of sapience, or maybe it has something to do with how dangerous a magical creature is to him. Maybe if he had been the one in the Tournament instead of Longbottom, the dragons wouldn’t have been able to-

“Harry.”

“Sorry,” Harry apologizes. His research-flights, as he thinks of them, haven’t ever disturbed someone before, because it’s not like he talked to people on a regular basis. “Well, I suppose there is one person who would be able to tell me if Sirius Black left me anything. Remus Lupin.”

“Our third-year Defense professor? Why?” Nott blinks, which seems to be a habit with him. Maybe Harry can be good for Nott by giving him more things to be surprised about. Otherwise, he doesn’t think that anything he does is likely to come across as very good for Nott, personally.

“Because he told a story to Longbottom about how he knew my parents. It was the first time I’d heard exactly what happened that night.” Harry bites his lip pensively. “I can assume that with the protective magic fading, he probably has memories of me and will be hoping for some kind of contact with me. I mean, I hope that, too. I have no idea what he’s been doing in the past three years.”

“I’m surprised that you didn’t try to write to him, since you know letters weren’t subject to the protective magic.”

“Honestly? It never seemed all that important.”

Nott snorts a little. “And yet, it’s important to you to get involved in the defeat of the Dark Lord and the fate of the world.”

“I like studying at Hogwarts. I’d like to pass my NEWTS, which are written, so that I can get any kind of career I want. And as long as That Bastard is around, half-bloods with the kind of political history my parents had aren’t going to be welcome at Hogwarts.”

“Fair enough,” Nott says after a minute. He looks stunned, but Harry doesn’t know why. Then again, many things don’t make sense about Nott, including the way he thinks that it’s all right for him to use Harry’s first name.

It’s not that that bothers Harry, not really. It just strikes him as weird. They don’t truly know each other, and Nott has known for almost a year now that all personal debt was wiped out between them, so why treat Harry as a friend?

Why give him shelter in his house, as a matter of fact?

But that’s the sort of fact that Harry thinks it would be prudent not to call Nott’s attention to, right now, so he just sighs and says, “I’ll write to Lupin. Like you said, it would be a good chance that he’d know if Black left me anything.”

“You said that.”

“Right.” Harry shrugs. “Sorry, Nott. It’s not like I’m used to any regular conversation.”

Nott nods. Now he looks amused. Harry gives up on figuring him out. He’s standing to get some ink and parchment, which he saw in his guest room last night, when Nott says, “I can go back to Nott’s Nook, take some of my father’s journals, and see what he says about the Lestranges.”

“Isn’t that dangerous for you? And where’s Nott’s Nook? Your father’s house?”

“It intrigues me that you ask that question second,” Nott says, but he goes on before Harry can ask what’s so intriguing. “Yes, it’s my father’s house. But as long as I choose a time when he’s out, the rune you gave me protects me well enough that I can risk it.”

Harry nods slowly. “All right. You don’t have to get involved in this, you know. Giving me shelter is enough.”

“I could sit back and act neutral, but then I wouldn’t get what I want.”

“What you-oh. You want to go back and study at Hogwarts, too? And it might not be safe enough for you even as a pure-blood if you don’t follow That Bastard.”

“Good thinking,” Nott says, and reaches over Harry’s chair to scratch Merlin’s head one more time before he ventures upstairs. Harry shakes his head at him, especially since he felt Nott’s fingers in his hair for a second.

Harry supposes that he’s probably confusing to ordinary people since he spent so much of his life under the protective magic and has no idea how to act around others most of the time, but Nott is confusing enough to give him a run for his Galleons.

*

Lupin writes back within a day after Harry sends the letter, perhaps because Harry used one of Nott’s two barn owls instead of the irritable Merlin. His writing dashes across the parchment, with some blots here and there.

Dear Harry,

Of course I remember you. I so wish that I’d been able to forge a closer connection with you during your third year. And I wish that I’d been able to stay on as Defense professor. Sadly, by that time Headmaster Dumbledore had come to believe that the curse on the position was real, and he thought it wasn’t worth the risk to try and have me stay more than one year.

The magic you describe makes sense, at least as far as explaining why I never once thought of you during the years that you spent outside of Hogwarts and there, but I’m afraid that I don’t know who cast it. It could have been your parents or Sirius. He knew some Dark Arts spells from growing up in a family dedicated to them that he never shared with us.

I was close friends with Sirius and your parents, both. I was so sorry to lose all of them that it wrecked my life for years. Any stories that you want to know of them, please ask me.

As far as what Sirius left you, I’ve included a list of the vault numbers and one house address below. I held onto it for years because it seemed important, but it didn’t have your name and I’m afraid that the curse on you made me forget who it was for. I hope everything goes well with finding the artifacts that can help you survive.

Please let me know when you want to meet.

Sincerely,
Remus Lupin.

“Huh,” Harry mumbles once he’s finished reading the letter, sitting back and staring at the ceiling. He never imagined that Remus Lupin would be so eager to meet with him and try to forge some kind of-what, connection? That’s the only thing Harry can call it.

He’s got used to never having a family. His Muggle relatives wouldn’t have been that to him even if they could see him, and he doesn’t remember his parents or Sirius Black at all. If the protective magic was their work, they already did much more for him than they would have by leaving him multiple vaults full of money or furniture.

But this letter does make him wonder, a little wistfully, what it would have been like if the protective magic wasn’t there and other people could see him. If he’d have friends, and if he would have made a deep connection with Lupin.

Then Harry sighs. He supposes he’ll never know. And if friends are like Nott, staring at him intently while waiting for him to explain the letter, Harry’s not sure he wants more. Why do people need to act like he’s important and they’re waiting for him to do things just because they can see him? He didn’t matter for years, surely he can not matter again.

Once the quest for the Horcruxes is resolved, anyway. And that means that he should finish it up soon-the parts he can do-so that he can go back to researching things to replace his protective magic.

“There’s a list of vault numbers and a house that my godfather left for me,” Harry says. “The house is probably the best bet, because there didn’t seem to be darkness beyond the cabinet in the vision. What do you think about visiting this place?”

Nott nods at once. “We can go tomorrow morning.”

Harry blinks, because he didn’t mean for Nott to go with him. He was just asking the bloke’s advice. But then he shrugs. “All right. I’ll work up a few runic circles to take with us that should make us less noticeable.”

“Aren’t you going to ask about what I found in my father’s journals?”

“I didn’t know you went already. I mean, I was in the library,” Harry feels the need to add as he watches Nott roll his eyes. “It was distracting.”

“Yes, I know,” Nott says, on the heels of a sigh. “You were Sorted correctly.” Luckily, he goes on before Harry can figure out if that’s meant to be an insult. Dealing with people is confusing. He’ll be glad when he doesn’t have to do it anymore. “I managed to get confirmation that my father was at some sort of Death Eater gathering yesterday evening, and I went to find the journals.”

“What did they say?” Harry demands, leaning forwards.

Nott pauses and stares at him. Harry doesn’t roll his eyes, because he’s not as rude as Nott, but it’s close. What is his addiction to dramatic pauses?

Oddly, when Nott goes on he’s a little flushed and has to clear his throat in a way that doesn’t signal dramatic pause. Harry is about to ask what’s wrong, but then decides that he doesn’t care that much. “I found that my father was grumbling about Bellatrix Lestrange being entrusted with ‘something special’ the year before we were born. Based on the vision you saw, that’s probably that cup that looks like it’s in a Gringotts vault. Bellatrix Lestrange’s, I assume.”

Harry nods. “Then I’ll pass that information on to Longbottom.”

“Thank Merlin,” Nott says unexpectedly, and Harry frowns at him. Nott waves a hand. “I thought you might insist on going after it personally the way we’ll be going to the Black house.”

Harry snorts. “We have the ability to get into the Black house, and take the locket out if we need to. I know a little about handling Horcruxes because of the diary. If you think I’m going to break into Gringotts and take something from a vault there, you’re mental.”

“The way you explain the difference makes it sound clear. And I suppose that you never were considered for Sorting into Gryffindor.”

Harry smiles. “No.”

*
Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, turns out to be a dingey townhouse in the middle of a row of dingey townhouses. Harry frowns. “From what you’ve said about the Black family being a nest of blood purists, I’m amazed they were willing to live here.”

“Perhaps they weren’t always as bad as they later became. Or they came up with ways to make the house secure enough for them.”

Harry glances sharply at Nott. He’s darting his eyes around everywhere, and his hand rests on his wand. Harry wonders if he can sense the Horcrux from this far away, although all Harry feels is a slight tingle of magic that he thinks relates to decaying defensive wards. “What’s wrong, Nott?”

“There’s so many Muggles.”

Harry blinks. “Sorry?” He didn’t even think about that aspect of Nott coming with him, but then, until they got here, he thought the house was on the outskirts of London or Diagon Alley.

“How can you stand being around them so much?”

Harry shrugs. “I grew up with them during my childhood, when I just knew that something was different about me, but not what. Come on, we can go into the house and get out of their sight anyway.” He walks towards the house, with Nott coming after him like a shadow.

No key came with Lupin’s letter, but Harry doesn’t think he needs it, not after some of the things Nott said about snotty ancient pure-bloods. He reaches out and puts his hand on the door. There’s a sharp hiss, and a snake illusion rears from the doorknob.

But Harry knows it’s just an illusion, as the runic circle on his chest ignites and draws magic into him, charging the spell he casts before he can cast it. It hisses like a snake and looks like one, but doesn’t smell like one. When he casts the Finite, the snake vanishes with a puff of smoke.

“You’re not a Parselmouth, are you?” Nott asks.

“That’s Longbottom, not me,” Harry says absently as he presses his magic through his hand into the door. There’s wood, and there’s a sense of waiting, listening, watching magic. Harry speaks to that. “My name is Harry Potter. Sirius Black made me his heir. His brother is dead. His parents are dead. His cousins are in Azkaban or disowned or not here. I am come to claim the house.”

The magic sways back and forth for a second. Harry waits. Nott said that magic as ancient as the kind that probably wraps the Black properties always wants to survive. It’ll take him in place of someone better.

And that’s all Harry wants. He supposes a house of his own might be nice, but this one is probably in decay as bad as the wards on the inside. They’re here mostly to retrieve the Horcrux, and then he never has to come back again if he doesn’t want to.

The magic he can sense hisses almost like the snake illusion, but with an overwhelming sense of You’ll do, I suppose, and then settles heavily on him like a cloak. Harry catches his breath, and the door clicks open.

They step into an entryway that stinks so badly of mold that Harry grimaces. He can hear Nott casting some Air-Freshening Spells behind him, and he joins in, until they can at least breathe. He glances around. No cabinet like the one that held the Horcrux in his vision from the diary immediately greets him. “Well, it’s not right here. Upstairs or downstairs?”

Before Nott can answer, there’s an almighty shriek, and the curtains that were hanging off to the side and which Harry hadn’t paid any attention to jerk open. There’s a portrait of a woman there, an unpleasant one with heavy black hair and grey eyes. Harry vaguely remembers reading something that said the people of the Black family tend to look like that. She begins to scream words then. “DEFILERS OF MY ANCESTORS’ HOUSE! TRAITORS! FILTH! MY FOREFATHERS-”

Harry has already gathered his magic with the first shriek, since it might have been a Death Eater for all he knew. Now he hurls the half-formed spell, thinking very hard about how he wants her to go away. The shrieking stops, and smoke and dust obscures the portrait.

When Harry can see again, the portrait is gone.

“What did you do?”

“Got rid of it,” Harry says, turning with a small frown. “You don’t wear glasses, but you sound like you need them.”

“But I don’t know a spell that could just destroy a portrait like that,” Nott says, as if his not knowing it means the spell can’t exist. Harry is just about to point out this logical fallacy when Nott adds, “And I don’t know anyone whose body would glow when they cast it.”

“Glow?” Harry looks down, but the glow of the runic circles, which he’s certain was there if Nott bothered to comment on it, has faded. He sighs. “It’s not a side-effect that I thought about before. Or noticed. Of course, there was no one before this to see me and tell me it happened.”

“But what did you do?”

Harry hesitates, then decides that Nott’s wide eyes and trembling hand are worse than they were when they were outside with the Muggles, and strips off his robe and then his shirt. He turns so Nott can see the runic circle on his back. From the sharp gasp Nott makes, he sees it, all right.

“I drew runic circles on myself,” Harry explains, glancing back at Nott. “My body is the only thing that absolutely no one can take away from me without killing me. And they act together to give me magic of various kinds. I draw magic from the air all the time, and they make the spells half-formed before they can be cast-”

“You carved circles in your flesh.”

“I had to, if I wanted them to work.” Harry frowns down at the circle on his right side, the one that will Portkey him back to the Leaky Cauldron. “But I’ll have to redo them because I can’t stay where I was staying anymore.”

Nott doesn’t say anything. Harry looks up and finds Nott staring at him with the flush to his cheeks that he had when they were talking about his father’s journals. Harry shakes his head. He’s never, ever going to understand people.

Then an idea comes to him, and Harry smiles. Why not? He thought of creating runic circles, or one big one, that would replace his protective magic, but he might as well carve one into his flesh that will do that and make it permanent around him, since he has to redo the circles anyway.

“Can you-put your clothes back on? We need to find the locket Horcrux and get out of here.”

Harry turns back to Nott and sees him averting his eyes. Maybe he’s not that used to nakedness, at that, or even half-nakedness. From what he says, he grew up with no siblings and only his father, and Slytherin has a reputation as the most prudish of the Houses.

“Of course. Sorry, Nott.”

“And can you call me Theodore?”

“Er, sure, if you want,” Harry says, nonplused now. He noticed Theodore calling him by his first name, but he didn’t see a reason to change things or call attention to it. If Theodore wants to change things, though, Harry can live with that. He shrugs at Theodore, smiles, and nods at the stairs. “Upstairs or downstairs?”

Theodore opens his mouth, and then another interruption appears.

“Evil filth be destroying Mistress’s portrait!”

Harry blinks at the wizened house-elf that’s standing on the stairs, wringing his hands and staring at the empty wall with great tragic eyes. He has grey hair, or sort of; it’s hard to tell if it’s that color from age or dirt. He has knees that seem to have turned backwards, and huge green eyes that shimmer with tears.

Harry has no idea who he is, and he feels sorry for the poor creature shut up here for years, probably by himself except for that insane portrait. But at least the elf might know where the Horcrux is. “Have you seen a golden locket around?”

The elf spins and stares at him. Then he screams, “Filth not be taking Master Regulus’s locket!” and charges.

Harry conjures a shield wall that holds the elf back. He tries to pop around it, but Harry has thought of that, and the shield extends around him and Theodore and won’t let anyone except them perform magic in it. Harry frowns at the elf and says, “If you don’t want to say, don’t. We’re not going to steal it, though. It’s a Horcrux, and it belongs to V-a real bastard, and we’re going to destroy it.”

It’s as though those words themselves are an incantation. The elf freezes and stares up at Harry. “You be destroying Master Regulus’s locket?”

“Yes. We know how to do it. We’ve already destroyed another one.” Harry glances back at Theodore and sees his mouth firming, as if he disapproves of Harry telling the elf so much. Harry shrugs. Well, it’s his choice. And it’s not as though the elf has shown any indication before this to charge off and inform people about Horcruxes.

“Kreacher be getting Master Regulus’s locket,” the elf whispers, subdued, and vanishes.

Harry smiles. “Well, that was easy.”

“You’re insane, Potter.”

“I thought we were calling each other by our first names now, Theodore.” Harry turns around and pouts at him. “My feelings are hurt.”

Theodore actually opens his mouth as if to apologize, and then falls silent with a narrow-eyed glance at Harry. “You are infuriating.”

“I don’t see why,” Harry says, and smiles at him, and turns back to the house-elf as he appears again. “Thank you, Kreacher? That’s your name, right?”

“No one bes asking,” the elf says direfully, and lets the locket fall towards Harry’s hand. Harry has already conjured a piece of silk, though, and uses that to wrap the locket. It’s a gaudy thing, gleaming silver other than the emerald serpent shape on the front. It also feels quieter than the diary, maybe because someone could write in the diary easily but it would take more effort to interact with the locket.

“I’m asking,” Harry says, and puts the locket away in a pouch hanging from his belt. “Thank you, Kreacher. I promise you it will be destroyed.” He glances over his shoulder at Theodore. “Can you send a Pensieve memory through the post?”

“You could bottle it and give the owl instructions to be careful,” Theodore says doubtfully. “Which means that we shouldn’t use your Merlin.” Harry grins, and Theodore smiles back as if against his will. “But who do you want to send it to?”

“I was going to send Kreacher a Pensieve memory of us destroying the locket.”

Both Kreacher and Theodore stare at him. Harry sighs. He really doesn’t understand people. He’s rude without meaning to be, and then when he offers to do something polite, everyone acts like it’s the most scandalous idea ever.

The sooner he gets back under the protective magic and people can ignore him again, the better for him and them.

“Kreacher would be liking that,” the elf whispers, wringing his hands.

“We can do that,” Theodore says, after a glance at Harry that he seems to know means he can’t suggest differently. “But we’ll have to be careful with the owl, like I said, and you should watch the memory beforehand, to make sure that it contains exactly what you want it to contain.”

“That’s no problem if you have a Pensieve,” Harry says, and waits for Theodore to nod again before he glances at the elf. “Thank you, Kreacher.”

Kreacher nods uncertainly one more time, and then vanishes. Theodore turns to Harry as they leave the house.

“Most wizards don’t treat house-elves like people, you know,” he says. “I’m sure the Blacks who used to live there probably didn’t, or the elf wouldn’t be so-insane.”

“I’m not most wizards,” Harry says, although he’s pleased to have an explanation of why everyone was staring at him like he was mad. “We’ll do this, and then Kreacher won’t come to your house and try to steal the locket back or something. We’ve got to worry he might do that, if he’s protected it for this long and thinks of it as something that belongs to his dead master instead of That Bastard.”

Theodore studies him with wide grey eyes for a moment more, then nods. At least he doesn’t try to protest again, either when he’s destroying the locket with Fiendfyre or when Harry sends a copy of the Pensieve memory of the destruction to Kreacher with one of Theodore’s calmer barn owls.

But Harry does wake up that evening, after three hours of sleep, and see Theodore standing in his doorway. From the tilt of his head, he’s staring at Harry the way he did in Number Twelve earlier today.

Then he turns around and walks away.

People are very, very strange, Harry thinks as he curls up and goes back to sleep, magical or not, wizard or elven.

Part Six.