Pre-Chapter A/N: More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for.
"A week?" I asked, gobsmacked. That was—it should have been impossible. I knew more about magical medicine than most, and there was a bit of an unofficial rule: three days. Any wound or malady that could not be healed in three days would never be healed at all. So how had I been unconscious for a whole week? I felt along my body. All my limbs were intact—at least they seemed to be. I flexed my fingers—thumb, index, middle, ring, pinky, on both hands, and then again for good measure before I did the same with my toes. All my senses were firing at full power, even better than full power. They were still as ritual-enhanced as they should have been. I could smell the vanilla in Fleur's shampoo, as well as the faint hint of lipstick from Sirius's mouth. That corndog! Good on you, old man. I could hear them both as they spoke, telling me about this and that. I could even see as well as I should.
When it came to my magic, I could feel it there, as potent as ever, just waiting for a focus so I could unleash it and bend the world to my will. The only issue was that I could not feel my wand. It was nowhere near me.
"Where is my wand?" I cut in, interrupting Fleur as she said something or other about the Beauxbatons contingent and what had happened. Her lips clamped shut, and while I could tell I would be paying for the rude interruption later, this felt like a more important consideration, if I was being fully honest.
"Your wand?" she asked.
"I believe, Miss Delacour, that young Harry here is referring to this," the voice came from the entrance as Albus Motherfucking Dumbledore strode into the room with a wand floating right in front of him. Not my wand. The memories of what had happened in the graveyard had come to me fully now. It was Voldemort's—Riddle's. But he had mine now, and that was all I'd made it out with. It was as much mine as anything was, I guessed.
"May I have it?" I said, stretching out my hand.
"Now, now, Harry. We both know this is not your wand. It has been many years since Sirius saw this particular wand in action, so I forgive him not recognizing it immediately, but I could never mistake this 13-inch branch of yew with a phoenix feather core for any other. So I need to know how you got a hold of it, Harry. And I need to know urgently."
"You should know already," I said, turning my lip upwards. He had stopped in front of the foot of my bed, but so far away that I could not wandlessly summon it to myself. Either that was a coincidence or he knew. And this was not a world of coincidences.
"What do you mean, Harry?" He was still going to play dumb? Fine.
"I mean that you had me unconscious here, probably had your mediwitch feeding me sleeping potions when Sirius wasn't paying attention so you could rifle through my mind at your will. You know exactly what happened and why I have that wand," I accused. I had no evidence, but I had a strong feeling that this was what had happened, and everything I knew about Dumbledore told me that this was just the kind of thing he would do. It was right up his wheelhouse.
Fleur looked taken aback by the venom in my mouth, and Sirius turned to Dumbledore with narrowed eyes. But the man was a good actor, on top of everything he was. He placed one hand on his chest and took a step back.
"You really think so lowly of me, Harry? How did I allow things to get so bad?" He addressed the last bit to himself, playing up that kindly old grandfather angle for all he could. I would not be buying it.
"Harry, I am aware that a distance has built between us, even more so that there has been a disenchantment on your end with me and my position as of recent, but I assure you that I would never stoop so low. Not with a student whom I am oath-bound to protect and care for, and never with you. And if you cannot believe me, then I know you know Madam Pomfrey. Would she truly allow me to do such? I assure you she would have detected any use of the mind arts on you. Notwithstanding both of those factors, both you and I know that your Occlumency is too strong to allow me to rifle your mind with impunity. If I did such, I would be in a much feebler state, trust me," he said, and he made sense, but that was what made Dumbledore so fucking dangerous. He made sense. He always fucking made sense.
"Then explain why I was knocked out for a week. Three days. That's it. Three days should have been enough to deal with anything I had," I said.
"Cruciatus aftereffects last much longer, as I know you are aware. Yet you do not feel them. Do you not wonder why? Your prolonged unconsciousness was bi-causal. For one, we made the decision to keep you under longer so your body could fully heal from the effects of your time under the Cruciatus." Fleur gasped at that—had she not been made aware? Her grip on me tightened even further.
"For the other reason, the wards had a unique component within them. When you bounced off, your magic did not react favorably. We were not able to safely use magic on you for over a day. Poppy would probably thank you for giving her the opportunity to brush up her knowledge of Muggle medicine if she was not presently busy resting away the exertion. That combination meant this was the safest we could wake you," he said. Fuck. I actually believed him. I knew I shouldn't. But he sounded so believable and so honest that it seemed I had no other option. Both Sirius and Fleur clearly did. I could not think of a logical means to poke a hole in his argument, and so I accepted it with a nod of my head.
"So now, Harry, can you tell me what happened? As much as you can remember. Not just what is relevant—every sound, every smell, every feeling that hitched at your skin and made you want to react. I need to know all of it." He said, and this was the time for me to make a choice. Tell him, or don't tell him. I laughed internally. That was not a choice—not really. I couldn't face Voldemort on my own—nothing about that engagement with him had been enough to convince me otherwise. And even if I was silly enough to think that, there was no chance I'd beat the Death Eaters. Besides, I thought, looking at the old man, there was no way to confirm what he knew or did not know, so it was safer to tell the whole truth lest he look upon me as an enemy.
"So I guess it started when I took the cup in the maze," I said, taking a deep breath and only slightly faking the shudder that ran through me as I thought of that trap. I'd never been so helpless—in either of my lives. The only way out had been surrender. I would find that man, I knew, and I would show him why Doom never surrendered. I vowed it to myself.
"I appeared on the podium. But I couldn't leave it. There was some sort of pink dome all around me. The man—there was a man in a hood there—"
"A man? You are sure it was a man?" Dumbledore interrupted.
"Well, their voice sounded masculine, but I couldn't exactly ask about their genitals or gender identity," I snarked back. He looked like he still had something to say, but he stepped off the matter.
"The man told me about the dome. Said it could absorb all kinds of magic and even the magic in my own body. I tried sending the most powerful spell I knew but it did nothing to the dome."
"Which spell was it?" As if I would admit to using a Killing Curse here.
"Fulgur Tempestas," I said, and Sirius whistled while Fleur looked at me in shock.
"You never cease to amaze me, Harry. Continue." He said with a nod of his head. I wondered if he was sucking up to make up for all the shit he'd been pulling.
"The spell didn't work. Nothing worked. And then he told me the dome would feed on my own magic while I remained within. He'd shut off the air as well. So I had two time bombs ticking—one was the air, the other was my magic. So I thought it through. He didn't seem like he wanted to kill me. That was way too much effort to kill someone when a Killing Curse to the back worked just as well as anything did. And with their resources, I had little reason to doubt there would have been any difficulty in doing that. So I decided that it was better to run out of airtime than magic. I hastened it by doing some exercises so I would run out of air even faster."
"So you consciously decided to suffocate yourself?" Dumbledore asked, looking genuinely gobsmacked. Sirius looked incensed, and Fleur had pulled back a bit to look at me. I wondered what all the fuss was about.
"Air was better to lose because I was sure that they would drop the barrier once I lost consciousness, and there was little reason to believe that the experience would hamper my ability to escape from wherever they held me. Running out of magic would have basically made me a sitting duck for days," I said, explaining the logic to them.
"Did you never consider the chance that we could help—that I could help?" Sirius asked.
"The dome blocked sound as well. Calling out to you did nothing," I said.
"You should have still waited, Harry. That was so stupid. You allowed yourself to get taken because you wanted to have good odds of escaping later on? What if they'd just killed you or held you somewhere you couldn't have escaped from?" At the end of the sentence, he was shouting, and I found myself genuinely lost for words. What else could I have done? Facing Voldemort with no magic would have been stupid.
"Well, neither of those happened because I'm here now, aren't I?" I shot back.
"Okay, that's enough. Harry, can you tell us what happened next—after you presumably lost consciousness?"
"I woke up in a graveyard."
"Which graveyard?"
"How exactly am I supposed to know, Headmaster? I do know that I was tied to a grave belonging to a Tom Riddle, son of Thomas and Mary Riddle." I watched as Dumbledore nodded, like he expected this. And I wouldn't be surprised if he did. It wasn't like he hadn't been predicting Voldemort's return for like an eternity.
"Was that him, Headmaster? It couldn't have been, could it? It said he was born in 1905. That wouldn't make sense because he went to Hogwarts with Hagrid," I said, playing dumb.
"Who? Who's Tom Riddle, Harry?" Sirius asked.
"Tom Marvolo Riddle was a student who once walked these halls. Brighter than any other I have seen, save perhaps one." He gave me a significant look at that, and against my better reason, I actually found myself being flattered by what was clearly a transparent attempt to get in my good graces.
"He fell to the Dark Arts with an abandon few could match, and decades after his scholarship here, he returned to Britain with another name and a band of followers dedicated to obeying his every whim."
"You-Know-Who?" Sirius caught on. Dumbledore nodded.
"Call him Voldemort, Sirius. Fear of a name—"
"Yeah, I'm not doing that, Dumbledore. You can call him whatever you want, but I still remember what those days were like, in case you've forgotten. But you're telling me You-Know-Who's name is Tom? Tom?" He chuckled, before breaking down into full-blown laughter. He seemed to be having a good time at least—Sirius. I wondered how that would last once I told him Voldemort was back.
"To answer your question though, Harry. Tom was a Junior. He was the son of Muggle Tom Riddle and a witch, Merope Gaunt. Maybe if you consent to returning to Hogwarts next year, we can explore his origins together."
I gave him a flat look at the attempt at manipulation. Like, really? That was the best he could come up with. To his credit, he at least blushed a bit.
"So what did you see in the graveyard?"
"Not much. I'd barely done any looking around when he appeared."
"In the flesh? He had a body?"
"A complete one. Not attached to the back of someone's head or a figment from a diary or whatever. He had a body with arms and legs and magic…so much magic. It was unreal," I said.
"Do you know how he regained the body?" There was a narrowing in the Headmaster's eyes now. Did he not believe me? Or was that just a sign that he was thinking things through within himself?
"I haven't the slightest idea," I said. Maybe if I didn't tell him my suspicions that he'd used my blood in his resurrection, then he wouldn't start scheming to get me killed by the man. That was a faint hope, but at least it was something.
"I see. So when you saw him, what happened next?"
"He tried to invade my mind."
"And you resisted?" Was that awe in Dumbledore's tone?
"I don't think I would be here if I hadn't. I managed to fight him off, and while we were fighting mentally, I managed to get enough of a drop on him that I managed to hit him. Magically, he was extremely strong, but physically, not so much so. I think even Sirius could take him in a fistfight."
"Heyyyy," I heard the Black prankster complain but ignored him to continue.
"I wrestled his wand away. I dueled Barty Crouch Junior for a few seconds, but in the end, I just Apparated away since the odds were really far from being in my favor. Maybe I could have pushed through and defeated Voldemort, especially since he didn't have his wand on him anymore, but I don't think I would have been able to escape if I did that," I said, watching Dumbledore's face very closely for any signs of what he was feeling.
"Do—do you think I made the right choice?" I asked, adding some feigned hesitancy to my voice. Of course I made the right choice. Even a dozen Voldemorts were not worth my life. This entire world put together, when placed on a scale, would struggle to find itself on anything even close to even footing with my life.
"Of course you did," Sirius shot in heatedly, stepping closer to my bed almost like he wanted to step between Dumbledore and I. There was a fire in his eyes. "Voldemort might be bad and all, but nothing is worth your life, Harry. Your parents didn't give up their lives so you could be some chosen one or whatever, only trying to defeat Voldemort. They gave their lives so you could live a long, happy life of your own." I could see the way Dumbledore's face twitched at the mention of a chosen one. Did Sirius mean to refer to the prophecy?
"What do you mean by chosen one, Sirius?" I pounced on it. I already knew about the prophecy, but a Harry who was ignorant about it would never have missed such an obvious lead. Sirius moved to answer, but before he could get a word out, Dumbledore's hand was on his shoulder.
"That's a matter we can focus on at a later date, Sirius. Instead, we should get going. I suspect that young Harry and Miss Delacour here are eager to have their time to themselves to talk without us over their shoulders." Dumbledore said. And like clockwork, Sirius's attention was elsewhere. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that regardless of how much Sirius loved me, he would always at least be partly Dumbledore's man.
"Talk, huh?" he asked, wagging his eyebrows in my direction. Occlumency meant I could blush at will, so I summoned the requisite emotions to give him the reaction he was looking for.
"Well, let's not be interrupting your talking, yeah? See you later, Harry. Make sure to talk about a lot." He said, backing away from us. And then he waved his wand, closing the curtains around my bed.
"Just giving you some additional privacy for your talk, yeah. And make sure you use a Silencing Charm so you don't draw attention with all your talking." His voice came over the curtains. I turned to Fleur and found her struggling to hold in her laughter. I waggled my eyebrows at her, and she gave in, shoving her face into my chest to avoid the sounds of her wheezing laugh spreading past the tent.
Maybe it was for the best if Dumbledore felt Sirius was his man. I'd need someone in their camp, at the very least to keep me updated on what they were doing. I just had to make sure that Sirius wasn't aware of everything I was planning or doing. Basically, just the same as ever.
"Are you going to spend all your time scheming in that head of yours, or do you want to talk?" The emphasis the Veela witch placed on the word talk told me there would be little talking involved, and sent blood flowing to all the right places.
A/N: Aftermath of the third task complete, now we can move on to our next phase of the story. The things outside Hogwarts will move quickly in some places, and slowly in others. Just have to wait to see which happens with which. Next four chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.