Three Times Seven – Part 3– Keny972

Reading Time:
17 Minutes

WINDOW 2 – Deep Dive

Previously:

With a final sigh, he straightened and called for Kreacher. The elf appeared with a confused look on his wizened face.

“Lord Black called for Kreacher. You is not Lord Black, but, you is… Lord Black? Kreacher is very confused, Master who is not Master.”

Now:

If seeing Winky through the camera, behind a window, had been a shock, having Kreacher in front of him, no matter how prepared he had believed himself to be, was a blow.

The elf had barely begun to come around after the war when he died trying to save Teddy Lupin, when the boy was just two years old. It had been particularly shocking because the elf could not stand the boy, what with him being the son of a half-breed and a disinherited half-blood Black, but Harry had loved Teddy, and Kreacher, for some reason, had come to love Harry almost as much as he had loved his precious Master Regulus.

The worst of it was that the elf may have spared the little boy further injuries, but not his death, since those already inflicted had been more than enough. Andromeda did not die in that attack. No, the death of her grandson was simply the last straw, for the woman had by then lost all will to live, and her own magic took care of the rest. She died in her sleep, younger than most witches, and probably content with her fate. 

Still, despite the shock, Harry could see the elf beginning to calculate, already almost ready to leave, probably straight to Arcturus Black to report, so he said, “Stay there, Kreacher, and do not move until I gave my explicitely stated permission.”

Harry could see the consternation on the little creature’s face as he realised the order had taken hold.

“You is not Lord Black, even if you is Lord Black. Kreacher must report to Lord Black who is Lord Black.”

Harry sat cross-legged in front of the elf, since he might as well conserve a bit of strength while he talked to him.

“I am Lord Black, Kreacher. I became Lord Black when I turned seventeen, as sole heir to the current Heir, and that happened on the 31st of July, 1997.”

He stopped there, watching the realisation blossom on the little being’s face.

“Nonetheless, I do understand that there already is a Lord Black in this time, and you can rest assured that I will not be here long enough for my claim on the family magic to become a problem. However, I am here for several reasons, one of which is to prevent a second blood war, and for that, I need your help.”

Kreacher’s face, already awash with both confusion and suspicion, twisted further with one or the other, or perhaps both. “Kreacher’s help? What can Kreacher do for future Lord Black?”

“I know that Regulus Black left something for you to destroy.” At these words, the elf became somewhat agitated, so, before he could speak, Harry held up a hand. “You can keep it, for now. I will not stay in this time long enough to destroy anything, but I do know how it can be done, and I am currently preparing to leave that knowledge with Sirius Black and some of his friends.”

“Mistress’s disappointment?”

With a snort, Harry nodded. “And my godfather. If you want to fulfil Regulus’s last wish, you will need to work with the man. Moreover, I know Arcturus Black will be happy to learn that neither of his grandsons actually followed the madman who is the direct cause of his family’s decline. I am currently working on ending Sirius’s unjust incarceration, and what I would like you to do, once he is free, is give him both the locket and a book I will give you. It is a very important book for my goal, since it is in it that I will give him everything I can to prevent the war. I am prepared to make it an order, and I will, if only for your own protection, but I would prefer you to help of your own free will, in as much as you have any.”

And some he did have. Elves might be bound to obey, but they could take very creative liberties in how they interpreted an order, as both Dobby and Kreacher had proved, so Harry would really prefer for the little one to want to help.

Kreacher slowly nodded. “If Mistress’s disappointment can help Kreacher destroy the locket, then Kreacher will help.”

Harry smiled at that. “Thank you, Kreacher. Before midnight, could you find me a wooden box, oak preferably, roughly sixteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep? I will charm it so that it protects you from the locket’s influence, and I will probably have two more such artefacts for you to keep until Sirius is free. All right?”

Kreacher nodded, the confusion back on his face. “There is more?”

Apologetically, Harry nodded. “A few, yes. I have also got some letters here, and they need to reach their recipients quickly, or I would have used an owl.”

Harry summoned the letters and notes he had prepared earlier, along with one of the photographs he had taken at the Crouches’. It was a matter of seconds to cast some Attestation Charms on them, taking care to use the Black family variation for Arcturus’s.

“This one is for Lord Greengrass, but you can give it to Lord Black, and he will decide how best to have it delivered. This one is for Amelia Bones. I will need you to take it to the private office in her home, since elves can bypass most wizards’ wards, can’t they?”

Kreacher nodded, so he went on. “Once you are in her office, there should be a photo frame on the right. You will need to push a sliver of magic into the top right corner of the photograph, and the frame will open onto a small extended space, big enough for a few scrolls. Put this in there, along with the photograph, would you?”

Again, the elf nodded, and Harry continued. “Then tap the corner, and the photograph will start flashing with a faint, intermittent light and close itself. I need you to deliver that letter first when you leave here, and only once it is done may you go to Lord Black.” This note is for him. In it, I have explained who I am, given him as much proof as I could think of, and asked for his help with something.”

Kreacher took all the letters, then looked at him impatiently. “Can Kreacher go now?”

“One last thing, I need you to find me a reinforced cage in any non-soft metal, non magical, about as big as the box, again before midnight. Get it for me will you? and leave it here for me.”

The elf nodded again, and Harry, seeing the impatience on his face added with a nod, “You can go now.”

The moment Harry nodded, the elf left with a loud crack, and Harry exhaled. Well, that was something.

He painfully got up, ready once again to be on the move, regardless of how tired he felt. He had known going in that this would happen, and even if the reality hit a little harder than the theory, he still had a job to do.

He Apparated back to the health centre and, on his way to his chosen therapist’s office, picked up one of the centre’s leaflets. At this hour, the place was all but deserted except for a skeleton night crew, and it was easy enough to avoid them with a few careful charms.

He had turned it over in the back of his mind through the worst of the boundary, and when he finally settled on the woman, it was for the simplest of reasons: it was a sister Albert had lost, and Harry thought he might find it easier to speak of her to another woman, especially one too stubborn to let him talk around it.

So Harry carefully let himself into Dr [What’s her name]’s office, opened her appointment book, and added Albert Wright for a first meeting two days from now. He then cast a quick charm so that the writing matched every other appointment in the book, and a small Confundus on the entry itself, so that she would not question it too much, and then added her name and the date and time of the meeting to the leaflet.

That done, he Apparated to the block of flats where Albert lived at this point in time, a twenty-minute walk from the centre, and carefully made his way inside until he could slip into number 34, Albert’s flat.

Harry could feel himself tense. This man was responsible for the last decade of hell he had lived through, and, in a way, the very reason he had put himself through all of this, so it needed, needed, to go smoothly. He could not afford to miss anything here.

With that in mind, he took a minute to strengthen the Disillusionment Charm on himself, then recast the Notice-Me-Not, and added a Silencing Charm, just in case, before finally slipping into the flat.

He made sure not to touch anything, step on anything, or shift anything as he made his way to the small bedroom.

When he entered, he was not prepared for the three walls entirely covered with writing and theories about magic and about the biological differences between wix and Muggles, and certainly not for the small section dedicated to the Boy Who Lived. Apparently, Albert believed the toddler had ended the war after his sister’s death entirely on purpose. Harry would have been outraged if it had not been so sad.

Well, that would need a bit more work than he had anticipated coming in.

As Harry looked around him, he wondered for a second whether he should bother with the original plan at all, rather than simply kill the man, as Theo, Greengrass, and, surprisingly, Filius had advocated.

The decision on what to do with him had taken a long time and had involved a great deal of debate, a lot of angry words, and not many calm minds. In the end, Harry’s vote had counted twice, simply because he would be the one to actually do the deed, and he just could not see himself killing the man in cold blood for something he technically would not have done yet.

Still, faced with the beginning of the end of the world as he knew it, he could well understand why killing Albert had been the second most popular option. As it was, Harry would need to take a deep dive into the man’s mind just to be sure no loose end was left, and he would probably recommend that Albert be kept under surveillance for the rest of his life, though after tonight, the man’s fate would be out of his hands.

With a deep breath, he cast a nonverbal Silencing Ward around the room, then sent a quick Stupefy the Muggle’s way, followed by a Body-Bind for good measure. He had work to do. 

Before he could start, though, Kreacher appeared in the room with a loud crack and the requested box. For some reason, Harry had not expected the elf to come back to him so quickly, since he had been sure Lord Black would keep him longer.

“Future Lord Black, Kreacher has the box.”

The elf looked around in confusion, and then a small smile appeared on his wizened face. “Is Master torturing the Muggle? Kreacher can fetch old Master’s tools?”

Well, wasn’t that disturbing? “No, thank you, Kreacher. Give me that for a moment, please.”

Harry took the box and set it down on the bed beside Albert. It took him about ten minutes to charm it as he had promised and hand it back to the elf. “There you go. Put the locket in that, and you should start feeling better quickly. How did Lord Black take the news?”

Kreacher nodded as he took the box, then tilted his head. “Irritably. Master Lord Black was about to go sleep, but Master Lord Black read the note and questioned Kreacher, then he sent Kreacher along.” Kreacher shrugged. “Kreacher not know what Master will do.”

“Right, thanks, Kreacher. You can go now. I’ll call you once I have the other objects for you, and the book.”

“Yes, future Master.”

And once again he was alone with the potential engineer of Gaia’s death.

With a deep breath, Harry approached the man, peeled one of the Muggle’s eyes open, and dived.

As Severus Snape once told him, “The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing”. (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

So when Harry dived, he truly did so, and it was a bit like swimming through a miasma of feelings and ideas.

Wizards, even the least trained of them, had some natural defences against Legilimency, but Muggles had none, and for all that it was still somewhat dazing, orienting himself was not that hard. All he really had to do was think certain key words hard at Albert’s mind, and it presented him with everything he needed.

Mostly, he got exactly what he had expected: obsession, hatred born of grief, hours upon hours of mostly fruitless research, and an uncomfortably close series of visits to primary schools in Surrey in search of his younger self. Some memories struck harder than others, but Harry went through practically the man’s entire life in what felt like a matter of minutes, even if he focused on the years after his sister’s death.

Eight-year-old Albert, seated on the family sofa, reading a children’s book on useful flowers, when he heard a happy shriek from his big sister’s room. Seconds later, Amanda burst into the room like a storm, practically dancing, waving an odd letter around.

“Mama! Papa! I’m a witch! Magic is real!”

And then, before anybody could react, she was gone.

Too early. Older.

Seventeen-year-old Albert, seated in a café in Diagon Alley with his sister, the only reason he could even be there, and though he was normally busy looking everywhere at once, right now he was completely focused on Amanda.

“What do you mean, a war? Britain isn’t at war!”

She sighed. “Maybe not the non-magical side of the island, but the magical side very much is. The madman wants everyone like me, and their families, dead. I need you to help me convince Mum and Dad to let me ward the house. They’re convinced it doesn’t concern them, that it won’t touch them, but I worry. Will you help?”

Almost there. Just a bit further.

Seventeen-year-old Albert, coming back from the corner shop a week after learning about the wizarding war, and turning into his street to find pandemonium: sirens, oddly dressed police, and his sister and his parents, dead. And it was magic’s fault! All of it, magic’s fault!

There!

Albert, lurking near where he knew the Leaky Cauldron to be, just far enough away that whatever magic kept non-magicals out did not kick in. He needed answers; he needed to know. It had been four days since he had settled on this, since he had lost all his family, since he had started dodging social services, but he needed to know something, anything. For a while there had been nothing, and then, the day before, wizards had started celebrating so openly that even the least perceptive people had noticed something odd. Perhaps he could jump the next oddly dressed person he saw. Sure, they had magic, but Amanda had never been able to use hers without her wand, and he could be fast enough, he was sure…

…

“THE BOY WHO LIVED: YOU-KNOW-WHO VANQUISHED AT LAST”

“In an occurrence no one could have predicted, fifteen-month-old Harry Potter, son of the late James and Lily Potter, yesterday defeated You-Know-Who! How, you ask?…”

Albert could not read on. Three days. Three days earlier, and his family would still be alive. Couldn’t the brat have done something sooner? Did he not care about the Muggle-borns? What the hell had he been waiting for?

Yes, because obviously a fifteen-month-old toddler had such fine reasoning skills, let alone the autonomy to go hunting dark wizards.

Albert, poring over biology books and Amanda’s old Herbology and Potions texts. Surely there was something? Anything? Magic had taken his sister away, so he would take magic out, then.

…

“Wright! What are you doing?”

Albert looked up from the research notebook he had his head buried in to see Mr Albright, his supervisor, standing in the doorway.

“Sir! I was reading an old research paper I wrote on the properties of Plectranthus neochilus*. I had an idea for increasing the efficacy of common paracetamol by…”

“All right, all right, kid. Carry on. You’re talented, Wright, but you need to work on your focus.”

Albert nodded, and the man left him to his reading, which was in fact about wolfsbane, not that it looked to be all that useful for what he wanted.

…

“Young man, what are you doing here?”

Albert looked round at the bobby standing there. Bloody hell, one of the parents must have reported him.

“Sorry, sir, I’m looking into schools in the county. My girlfriend’s pregnant, and it’s making me a bit nervous.”

“Be that as it may, lurking around primary schools without a child doesn’t look good on anybody.”

“Right, sorry about that, sir. I’ll go.”

He should probably stop before one of them asked his name and the police started keeping an eye on him. This was the third school in Surrey he had been chased away from, and evidently the rumour that Lily Potter had family in the area had been wrong.

Anybody else in on the research? On the plan?

Only a faint image of Amanda flitting past, and no one else.

Any physical proof of magic?

A few flashes: a box full of letters, a few books and notes, the walls of the flat, the computer in the corner, and a stack of floppy disks beside it.

Good, no internet to worry about yet. Any violence?

Albert, in the doorway of a closed shop across from the Leaky Cauldron, the cold seeping through his coat, as it had every evening for two weeks. A man stumbled out of the pub just after eleven, singing under his breath, in bell-bottoms that had gone out of fashion years ago and a flowered blouse that had certainly been made for a woman, and Albert followed him without quite deciding to.

The man turned into an alley to relieve himself, still humming, and he never even reached for his wand. The first blow knocked him against the bricks, and after that Albert stopped counting. He was not thinking of the man at all. He was thinking of a street full of sirens and three covered shapes on the pavement, and of the fact that this one was laughing, and that it was not fair, it was not fair, that any of them should still be laughing.

A torch beam swept the mouth of the alley, and a voice called out, “Oi! What’s going on there?” and Albert ran, his knuckles split and stinging, and did not stop until he had been sick in a gutter three streets away.

The next morning, he wrote down everything he could remember about how long it had taken the man to fight back. He had not.

Well, as disagreeable as it was to “remember”, at least Harry was now sure the chemist had yet to bring anyone else into his vendetta.

With a gasp, Harry extracted himself from the depths of the man’s mind, registering, first, that he had already used up more than a whole hour of his second window, and second, that the man was very much awake, if still frozen in place. He kept a light link to the Muggle’s mind for now, as he really needed to monitor him until he was ready to leave.

“Well, Albert, you’ve really gone and fucked this up, haven’t you?”

Harry could see the realisation hit the man and feel fear and hatred fighting for dominance in his mind.

“Well then, the next few minutes might be a bit uncomfortable, Albert, but take comfort in the knowledge that you won’t remember a thing.”

With that, Harry took hold of his wand, focused on the many, many memories he had to either erase or alter, and went to work.

“Obliviate.”

It took Harry twenty-three minutes he really did not have to edit everything. Now, as far as Albert Wright was concerned, there was no such thing as magic. His sister had been invited to an elite school at eleven and had gone gleefully, and she had died in 1981 of an aneurysm, while his parents had died the same night in a car accident on their way to the hospital, and with no one to blame, Albert had spent the next five years drowning his sorrows in alcohol. Then, earlier this week, he had been handed a leaflet for the health centre while grocery shopping, and on an impulse he had called to make an appointment.

Harry had left one memory almost untouched, that of the night he had followed a laughing stranger out of a pub and beaten him in an alley, but stripped of anything that pointed to magic, so that all Albert would remember was him grieving, drunken and lashing out at the first person who seemed too happy, and the shame of it, which Harry thought he deserved to keep.

Harry then added a very strong compulsion both to keep the appointment and to give therapy a genuine try, and at this point, the ball was in the Muggle’s court. Finally, he hit the man with a strong Somnus to send him back to sleep.

Of course, Albert might not actually have the time to get better, since he technically had already attacked a wizard, and Harry fully intended to report the offence to Madam Bones. What the witch would do with it, though, Harry could not begin to guess.

Harry then took the time to take down the walls of hatred surrounding them. He also had to search a little for the hidden compartment where Albert kept his sister’s letters, and edit them to remove all mention of magic. After that, he did not bother with subtlety and sent a pulse of raw magic into the computer, effectively frying it and, with it, all of Albert’s research.

He did a last round of the flat, making sure nothing had been left to chance, vanishing books and floppy disks alike. Then left the leaflet in the entryway and walked out, hoping it would be enough.