(no subject)

[kanedax]

Title: Harry Potter and the Dagger of Ravenclaw, Chapter 1: Limassol
Author: kanedax
Fandom: Harry Potterverse
Spoilers: HBP; Harry Potter & The Seven Soldiers
Rating: R for language and nudity
Summary: As they prepare for the next Horcrux, Harry finds more than he expects
Notes: This fic is the first chapter of the prequel to my story Harry Potter & The Seven Soldiers. It’s not a requirement that you read it before you read this, but I will say that I’ve introduced some exposition in Seven Soldiers, and Dagger is written under the belief that I don’t have to repeat a lot of it. Soldiers is here, and will also be posted above with every ensuing chapter of Dagger.
Also, I’m fairly sure I’ve accidentally made some mistakes with canon in here in regards to James Potter and The Marauders. If I have, meh, then call this AU. It’ll be AU come July 21st, anyway.
I don’t own Harry Potter. JK Rowling does. Get it right, punk.

Next Chapter (Awkward)

Harry Potter falls to his knees.

In front of him stand two gravestones. He looks up briefly to see Ginny Weasley arguing silently with Aberforth Dumbledore. Aberforth is holding a gaudy-looking necklace out to her, which she isn’t even seeing. Despite the total lack of sound, Harry can see Ginny is screaming at Aberforth. Tears are rolling down her cheeks.

That’s not important right now, he thinks, as he looks back down to the grave markers. He can’t read the lettering, you can never read the lettering, but he’s learned them to heart:

JAMES POTTER
DEVOTED HUSBAND
LOVING FATHER
1959-1981

LILY EVANS POTTER
DEVOTED WIFE
LOVING MOTHER
1959-1981

He feels sorrow well up inside him. He reaches his hands out, and feels somewhat comforted by the cold stone pressed against his palms.

“For Harry,” says a voice from behind the stones. Harry looks up again, and sees that Ginny and Aberforth have been replaced. Professor Minerva McGonagall stands where Aberforth stood, and the necklace was replaced by a shining sword. Ginny is gone, and Harry sees himself taking the sword.

“For Harry,” the voice repeats, but this time it is a voice that is in some ways less familiar, and in some ways more. The voice of his father, James Potter, as he hands a package to Albus Dumbledore.

For Harry, the voice echoes through Harry’s mind. He feels the stone beneath his left hand, the stone marking the resting place of James Potter, shifting. Melting, almost. He looks down, and sees a hole in the top of the tombstone. Inside is a book. Harry pulls it from its resting place. Holy Bible, the cover reads, although Harry can’t read it. He knows what it says, and also knows that what is contained inside bears little resemblance to the words on the front.

As in the past, Harry once again opens the book. Before the green light flashes, before the woman’s scream and the high-pitched sinister laughter, before he awakes, he reads the murky words:

Sirius Black
Frank Longbottom
Remus Lupin
James Potter

Harry Potter awoke with a gasp. His hand flew to his forehead, rubbing the lightning-bolt shaped scar. It was tingling slightly, but as soon as he placed his fingers upon the scar, the tingling stopped. His mind leapt instantly to his Occlumency lessons, but just as quickly fell away.

Screw it, Harry thought wearily, as he looked around in the near-darkness. If Voldemort was reading your dreams, then he already knows you’re here. If he doesn’t… well, he’ll know by the end of the day, one way or another.

As the pain in his scar vanished, two sharper pains in his lower body replaced it. Harry pulled the Covert Cowl away from his body and stood up gingerly. His hands instantly jumped to his lower back, which he massaged and stretched. Despite all of his years sleeping on the Dursley’s cot beneath the stairs, one week of sleeping on the hard ground made him realize he had been softened by his years at Hogwarts and the Burrow. The Dursley’s cot may not have been comfortable, he thought, but at least there were fewer rocks.

He chuckled to himself. Change that, he thought. The rocks are bad. That metal bar that had gone across my back all those years was worse.

He sniffed sleepily, and yawned. Kneeling back down to the ground, he felt around for where he had left the Cowl. His hands briefly touched the cold steel of the Sword of Gryffindor, which he had kept closely by his side each night since he, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger had briefly visited Hogwarts a week ago before beginning their journey.

At last, his hand grasped the black fabric, a gift to the three of them from Ron’s twin brothers, Fred and George. He rummaged through the inside lining until he found what he was looking for. Grasping the thin wooden stick, Harry pulled his wand out of the Cowl’s pocket. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he saw two black lumps across from him on the opposite side of the clearing. He nodded to himself, and turned toward the edge of the trees.

Lumos, he thought, and flinched as a shaft of light emanated from the tip of his wand. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the sudden light in the darkness, and then eventually walked forward, careful to avoid any bushes or logs that he might trip over.

After a minute of wrestling his way through the branches and shrubs surrounding their makeshift campsite, Harry found a patch far enough away to feel comfortable. He unzipped the fly of his trousers and began his morning constitutional. As he heard the patter on the ground below, he rested his arm against a nearby tree, and thought back to the dream he had awoken from.

For the past week, Harry, Ron, and Hermione had been hopping their way across the continent. Their ultimate destination, which Harry hoped they would reach by tonight, was the city of Cairo, Egypt. Just a four-hundred mile flight across the Mediterranean from where he now stood on the outskirts of Limassol, Cyprus, Harry knew beyond a doubt that Cairo hid what they were searching for: one of the three remaining Horcruxes.

He knew this because his father, James Potter, told him that it was true.

When Harry and his friends had visited Godric’s Hollow a week after the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour, their first stop was the graveyard where James and Lily rested. Overcome by grief, Harry had fallen to his knees in front of their gravestones, and laid his hands on their names. As he did, he had felt the stone vanish beneath his palms. Inside the gravestone was a book. The title was The Holy Bible, but when Harry opened it, he discovered that it was in a notebook and a journal, written by James in secret.

Harry had learned more in the next few days than he had ever known. James Potter knew about the prophecy concerning Harry and Voldemort. He had learned about the Horcruxes through Sirius, whose brother, Regulus Black, had explained Voldemort’s plans for immortality. Regulus’ last-ditch effort to get on the right side, James had assumed, before he was killed by Voldemort’s Death Eaters.

The journal was filled with six months worth of research, interview notes, maps, and timetables. James had chosen very few people in which to confide his information. His plan had been to seek out the Horcruxes with his fellow Marauders Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, and to destroy Voldemort before the Dark Lord had the opportunity to fulfill the prophecy.

In the final entry, which Harry had memorized long before he left the journal behind in the safe keeping of his vault in Gringotts, James is making his final preparations for the journey. He has left his Invisibility Cloak with Albus Dumbledore, knowing that, if they failed on their quest, it would be important for Harry to have. He had left Peter Pettigrew with the important task of Secret-Keeper after Sirius convinced him that Wormtail would be the less obvious target of them all.

And as he had signed his name for the last time, under the entry labeled October 30th, 1981, James was bringing his notes to the only other person, besides his wife and his Marauders, that he had trusted: Frank Longbottom. Knowing early on that the prophecy referred to either Harry or to Frank’s son, Neville, James felt a responsibility to let Frank, a fellow member of the Order of the Phoenix, in on his plans. He charged Frank with protecting both the Potters and the Longbottoms while he was away. In fact, the journal mentioned that Lily was planning on moving herself and Harry to the Longbottom residence after James and the others left for extra protection.

“As for this journal,” James had written, “If things go badly, Frank and Alice have sworn to keep my writings safely locked away, to be sealed by powerful magic that can only be broken by those of Potter blood. Hopefully these words are being read by myself or my wife Lily. If not, I can only hope that they are being read by my son Harry, or his children, or his grandchildren, and that it has not fallen into the wrong hands.”

The day after James had signed his name, he and his wife were dead. The next morning Sirius Black was arrested and imprisoned in Azkaban, and Remus Lupin was left alone as the last member of the now-destroyed Marauders. Frank and Alice Longbottom had apparently followed through with James’ last request, and sealed the journal away in a place that they knew Harry, and only Harry, would one day find: within James Potter’s tombstone. Within the next few months, Frank and Alice were tortured by the Death Eaters, and their secret disappeared with their sanity.

Harry sighed as he zipped up his trousers and looked to the east, where the sun was beginning to rise. As with everything else, James’ diary had left as many questions as answers. James had theorized that there was a Horcrux in Cairo, and another in the Canadian Rockies, between British Columbia and Alberta. The diary also contained spells and potion recipes that could be used to destroy the Horcruxes permanently. Along with this information, Harry’s study of the research caused a huge puzzle piece to fall in place in his mind, which lead him to RAB, Aberforth Dumbledore, and Slytherin’s locket.

The name Regulus Black had hit Harry like a ton of bricks. After he, Ron, and Hermione had returned from Godric’s Hollow, they visited Grimmauld Place to scour through old Black family histories. His suspicion was confirmed: Regulus’ full name was Regulus Arcturus Black. He and Hermione (with Ron standing aside with a dull look of confusion on his face) fit the pieces together quickly from there. They recalled finding a gaudy-looking locket when they had been cleaning out the house when the Order had moved in. They also remembered that Mundungus Fletcher had sold the same locket to Aberforth Dumbledore the next year.

The trio visited Aberforth, Professor Dumbledore’s bartender brother, at the Hog’s Head the next day. Recognizing Harry, Aberforth gladly led them into the back, where he had been keeping the locket in a chest.

“Reckon I’m not really sure why I kept it,” Aberforth had said as he pulled the locket out on its chain. “Fletcher sold it to me in bulk with some other rubbish.”

“Maybe you have more than a little of your brother in you,” Hermione smiled as she pulled a bottle from her cloak.

“Oh, I dunno abou’ that,” Aberforth said, blushing slightly as Hermione uncorked the bottle. “Me Albus was a great man, a fine bloke. I jus’ get people pissed.”

Hermione pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket, and read the words quietly as she poured a few drops of the potion onto the locket. The locket glowed a sickly green color, and the room filled with an unearthly shriek that forced Ron and Aberforth, along with everyone else in the main room of the Hog’s Head, to cover their ears.

Seconds later, the shriek died, and there was nothing left of Salazar Slytherin’s locket but a small pile of ash.

Aberforth Dumbledore’s face was white as a sheet. “What the ruddy hell was that?”

“That,” Hermione said, looking nervously at Harry and Ron, “was the right combination.”

Dumbledore, Harry thought as he walked back to the clearing. It always came back to Dumbledore. How much had Dumbledore known? How much did he keep from Harry, to make him follow the path that had been laid out before him?

It was a question that had been plaguing him after the meeting with Aberforth, after the three visited Hogwarts, and throughout this entire journey.

Had Albus Dumbledore known that Regulus had already taken the locket? Had he known that it was in Aberforth’s possession? If he had, why hadn’t he destroyed it?

Beyond that, why didn’t James tell Dumbledore about the Horcruxes? Did Dumbledore know whether he was told or not? Hermione had mentioned during their journey that the kind of spell that was placed on James Potter’s grave, a spell that restricts access to anyone beyond a certain bloodline, is extremely difficult to cast, especially when someone of the bloodline isn’t present to cast the spell.

Dumbledore had that power. Did he help Frank and Alice cast the spell? Did he know about the journal this whole time?

Harry guessed that all of this was true. For as long as he had known Dumbledore, Harry knew that the former Headmaster of Hogwarts often left people to their own devices. He knew that he was powerful, but he also recognized the power in others. He allowed Harry to find the Sorcerer’s Stone, to enter the Chamber of Secrets, and to discover the truth about Sirius on his own. Harry didn’t put it past him to have allowed James, Sirius, and Remus to search for the Horcruxes, to protect the Potters and the Longbottoms, and to allow Harry to discover his father’s journal, all without his assistance.

Dumbledore was a complex man, Harry thought. He was the kind of man who could read a mystery novel and know the answer by the end of the first chapter; yet would sit back quietly, yet with great joy and excitement, and watch as others worked their way through the puzzle on their own. Was he the kind of man who would sacrifice his own life simply to allow Harry to--?

Harry’s thoughts were cut off as he reached the campsite. His heart stopped in his chest. In the growing light, what he had originally taken to be the covered forms of Ron and Hermione were revealed to be just their cloaks spread across the ground. Next to where Hermoine had been sleeping, the blocky sack, which contained her book, lay absently in the dirt, just as Ron’s beaten leather pouch lay near his own resting place.

Harry drew his wand and rushed over to the pouch. Picking it up, he held it in front of his face.

“Hat!” he whispered fiercely. “Hat!”

Three seams opened in the side of the pouch, and the Sorting Hat looked sleepily up at Harry. “Morning, Potter,” it yawned. “And for your information, my name isn’t Hat.”

“Where’s Ron?” whispered Potter.

“It’s Gavin, and thanks for asking,” replied the Sorting Hat grumpily.

Harry looked blankly back at the Sorting Hat, his mouth hanging open. Gavin the Sorting Hat? He shook his head and repeated: “Where’s Ron?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Gavin said irritably.

“But he must have gone somewhere,” Harry said. “You were strapped around his belt…”

“Right, and he took me off before we went to bed,” said the Hat. “Honestly, Potter, do you think I’d let him leave me on all night? That boy rolls around more than a rotisserie chicken. I’d never get any sleep.”

Harry looked around the camp nervously. “They’re gone. They were gone when I woke up, and they were gone when I came back.”

“Maybe they went off to take a piss,” said Gavin. “Or to get some water.”

Harry shook his head. “They would have woken me,” he said. “Would have told me where they were going.”

“Or maybe they went off to snog,” the Sorting Hat continued. “About bloody time, too. Those smacking lips have been keeping me up too late each night. I’m amazed you can sleep through it.”

Harry, who had spent the better half of his life sleeping under a flight of steps regularly traveled by two extremely fat Dursleys, apparently didn’t know what the Sorting Hat was talking about. He looked back down at the two cloaks, and realizing that they probably would have brought them with in the cold of night, eliminated that possibility, as well.

“Ron!” he yelled into the forest. “Hermione!” His voice echoed through the trees, but there was no response. “Right,” he said, walking over to his cloak, “I’m going to look for them.”

“Well, you’re taking me with you right?” Gavin said as Harry put him down to pick up the Sword of Gryffindor.

“You stay here,” Harry said, strapping the sword to his belt. “Protect the cloaks and the book.”

“Right then,” said the Hat sarcastically, “you go off and save the day. If anyone comes looking for trouble, I’ll properly sort them into their correct Houses.”

“If there’s any trouble, just call.”

“Sure thing,” the Hat continued. “If a group of Muggles show up, a talking hat won’t arouse any suspicion.”

“Pretend you have a pager inside you, or something,” said Harry anxiously. “A really loud one.”

“What’s a pager?”

“It’s… it’s…” Harry stammered, trying to come up with a proper explanation that he didn’t really need to explain, “it’s a Muggle thing. It’s like a Howler, but a lot more irritating.”

“I see…”

“Look,” said Harry, exasperated, “If someone comes around looking for trouble, looking for magic things, they’re going to want to dig through you.”

“Right?”

“You make things appear and disappear, right?”

“That I do,” the Hat said proudly.

“Like maybe someone’s hand?”

The Hat paused. “You know, I’ve never tried that,” it said deeply. “Might be fun. And the screams would certainly get your attention.”

“I’m going to sweep the area,” said Harry, walking into the bushes.

“Right then,” Gavin the Sorting Hat yelled to him. “You go save the day. I’ll be here. Lurking. Hand bait!”

Harry shook his head as he pushed aside the shrubs. I liked him a lot better when he was reciting poetry, he thought.

As Harry circled around the edge of the clearing, looking for clues, his mind returned, as it had so often in the past two months, to the woman he had dreamed about that night.

Ginny.

The wedding had been bad. Worse than Harry had ever imagined. The image had been burned into his memory. Ginny standing across from Harry in her bedroom in the Burrow. Her eyes puffy from crying, her collar of her bridesmaid’s gown growing damp with her tears. Wanting to be with him, knowing that he wanted to be with her. It was the last conversation that they had had with each other, and it was a bruiser. Even when the three had visited Hogwarts at the start of term, it was Ron and Hermione who had spoken with Ginny. She wouldn’t even look Harry in the face, and Harry had to content himself with talking to Neville, Luna, and Hagrid before they had gone to meet Professor McGonagall.

She didn’t understand, Harry tried to explain to himself as he crashed through the underbrush. She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let her come. She didn’t understand the feeling that I’m getting in my stomach right now, knowing that my friends could be in danger because I let my guard down. She didn’t understand that it’s still nothing compared to what I’d be feeling if she was the one that had gone missing.

Harry turned his head to the left, and his stomach dropped. Off in the distance, he saw a piece of fabric, colored dark red, hanging from a branch.

His mind raced furiously as he moved slowly toward the cloth. Had Ron or Hermione been wearing anything that color last night? Harry was sure that, like himself, the three had packed very little clothing in the Sorting Hat. And what little they had been carrying, beyond their jeans, were colored in darks and whites. No bright colors. Especially not reds.

Blood, Harry’s thoughts screamed, it’s dark red, like fresh blood.

No, he responded. I can’t be. I would have heard a struggle, I would have…

Just then, before he could get close enough to the piece of clothing, he heard a rustle in the bushes just off to the left. He changed his path and ran toward the origin of the noise.

Maybe it’s them, he thought. Maybe one of them was injured, and they were left behind as a warning. Maybe…

His eyes bugged behind his glasses as he saw what lay before him.

Ron Weasley lay on his side in the grass. Behind Ron, her arm wrapped around his waist and her chest pressed against his back, lay Hermione Granger, her now short hair hanging lazily over her face. They were both were asleep, and as far as Harry could tell, didn’t have a stitch of clothing on them. Their clothing had, in fact, been strewn around the surrounding bushes.

Harry stepped back, his face burning red, and a twig snapped beneath his boot. At the noise, Hermione stirred and rolled over, exposing herself fully to Harry.

“Mmmm,” she said sleepily, her chest doing interesting things as she stretched her arms over her head. “Morning, Harry.”

Ron looked up, just as sleepily. “Mornin, Harry,” he repeated, rolling onto his back as well.

Harry’s mouth hung open. His eyes refused to blink, refused to turn away.

Hermione seemed to recognize his silence. “What’s wrong, Harry?”

As she asked this, she turned hazily to Ron. Their eyes slowly looked up and down each other’s naked bodies; looked up and down their own. They both looked up at Harry.

Something clicked.

“Harry!” Hermione and Ron yelled together. Hermione quickly threw both arms over her small breasts and drew her legs up to her chin. Ron quickly jumped to his feet, his hands cupping what God gave him.

“Holy…!” Harry yelped in the same instant, finally able to tear his eyes away as he spun around, facing as far away from the two lovers as possible. His forehead was burning, but this time he knew it wasn’t just from the scar. He was amazed that the heat wasn’t causing his glasses to fog.

“Harry!” Hermione said, one of her hands sliding down to cover her crotch as she stood. “This isn’t… This…”

“Sorry, mate,” Ron said as Harry heard the rustling sound of clothing being pulled on. “I didn’t… I mean… I…”

“I’ll… um…” Harry’s tongue felt like it was stapled to the top of his mouth. “I’ll just… be back at the camp… then…”

“Ron,” Harry heard Hermione whisper fiercely. “Where are my…?”

As Harry began walking away, his eyes once again turned to the piece of red-colored fabric hanging from the nearby tree.

“Oh, bloody hell,” he whined to himself. He raised his wand.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” Harry groaned as he floated Hermione’s dark red lace panties to her across the forest and walked, dazed, back to the clearing.

Next Chapter (Awkward)