They apparated to the front stoop of 12 Grimmauld Place as they had always done, and entered into a hallway that was nearly unrecognizable. The scent of new paint greeted them as they stared, open mouthed at the bright, strangely cheerful entryway. Moments later, a small dilapidated house elf appeared, wearing what looked like a slightly worn pillowcase and splattered from head to toe with light blue paint.
“Good morning, young masters!” he croaked in an unnaturally low voice. “Pardon Kreacher’s slowness sirs and miss, but Kreacher is finishing with miss’s quarters now.”
“Kreacher!” exclaimed Hermione. “Did you do all this in one night?”
“Of course, miss,” Kreacher replied with a note of pride. “Kreacher wanted to finish all rooms, but he is encountering”er”other matters requiring Kreacher’s attention.” His enormous eyes darted nervously to the closed curtain at the end of the hall that still housed the portrait of Sirius’s very foul mother.
It had taken Hermione a month to convince Harry to allow her to make any changes to the previous decoration. Everything had reminded him of Sirius. She had finally succeeded by reminding him that Sirius had been miserable stuck in such a dark and dingy place. She had found even greater problems in convincing Kreacher, who had argued so vehemently against it for the first few weeks that he had even resorted to using the term Mudblood again.
After two months of preparing her own meals and washing her own clothes, during which Kreacher was commonly seen once again in deep conversation with the portrait of the former owner of the house, Hermione had finally succeeded. It was as if the elf had always desired a change. Once his mind had been changed, Kreacher had followed her around the house, dutifully recording all of her ideas, and even offering some of his own suggestions.
Now, all three of them stood in awe of the complete transformation of the Black entryway.
“I can’t wait to see the kitchen,” said Ron as he made his way up the hallway. “Is anyone else hungry?”
“Ron, you have to get started on your potion first!” said Hermione, following him down the hall, and Harry recognized the beginning of a very busy morning. Hermione would soon be absorbed in talk of study schedules and making up for lost time. Once she was finished with Ron, she was sure to remember the parchment that Harry also owed to Professor Binns. Harry decided that now was the best time to mention his nightmare.
“Can we go into the parlor first?” he interrupted, hoping that the parlor had undergone the same miraculous change as the entryway. He had the feeling that it would be a much easier tale to tell in a bright and cheery place.
Neither of them questioned him, though both wore looks of worried curiosity as they followed him into the parlor, which was a thankfully off-white color. They sat down on the sofa expectantly. There was a moment's pause as Harry tried to determine how best to tell them without causing too much worry.
“My scar hurt again this morning,” he said simply.
Hermione’s eyebrows raised slightly, in alarm. She and Ron looked at each other, but said nothing. Harry told them what he remembered of the nightmare, finishing with his unpleasant awakening. They listened with darkening expressions. They had spent three years worrying whenever Harry’s scar had hurt. It had been so directly associated with Voldemort for so long that it was only natural to become alarmed, even though they all had been witnesses to Voldemort’s final moments.
A pensive silence fell over them when Harry had finished. Hermione was the first to speak.
“But you didn’t see Voldemort,” she reassured him. “Voldemort’s dead. We all know that. It was someone else you were seeing.”
“Could it have been a Death Eater?” asked Ron.
“I suppose…” began Harry, but was interrupted as Hermione continued, her brow furrowed in thought.
“It could have been simply because it’s been exactly one year since everything happened.” She was speaking more to herself than to the other two people in the parlor. “I mean”we don’t know exactly how curse scars react, do we?”
“Yeah! George says his scar hurts all the time!” Ron said hopefully.
Hermione rolled her eyes. “Ron, I hardly think you can compare George’s ear to the only killing curse scar ever known.”
Ron's mouth opened in response and Harry, recognizing the beginning of a typical round of bickering, seized the opportunity to bring the subject around to what had been worrying him.
“What if it was one of his more powerful Death Eaters?"
“If it was, I want to know which one so we can bring him in quick,” said Ron. “Whoever learns the Cruciatus Curse as their first spell has got to be really powerful!”
“And a very dark, twisted wizard.” Harry added, thinking more of those who had been able to capture and bind a wizard that dangerous.
"No one could learn that as their first spell,” said Hermione. “Not even a Death Eater. Even they have the trace on them as kids. If they performed Cruciatus anywhere…”
“Mum caught Fred trying to do it to a bee that stung him once,” interrupted Ron. “Didn’t know it was an Unforgivable Curse back then. Just learned it from friend.”
“And could he do it?” Hermione asked.
“Nah,” Ron admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “He still got it from mum though. He said his backside was red for a week!”
“Ron said it, Harry. A child could never do the Cruciatus curse. Remember in the ministry after Sirius…” Hermione paused. The reactive expression on Harry's face told her that she had entered dangerous territory. His neck visibly stiffened. “You tried to perform it on Bellatrix and it didn’t work.”
Harry’s eyes blazed momentarily. “I wouldn’t have any problems now if she were back by that veil,” he hissed.
“Yes, but you're stronger now," said Hermione quickly. "My point is that you have to really want it. It has to come from a really powerful wizard. No one could learn it as their first spell. Not even Voldemort could have done it. It had to have been only a nightmare, Harry.”
“Hermione’s got a point, mate,” said Ron, putting his arm around her. Harry felt himself growing more at ease. These were the words that he had been hoping to hear. He was unbelievably tired of living crisis after crisis. Now he just wanted to believe that everything was fine, and hearing it from his two best mates made it that much more real.
“I just don’t understand why my scar had to hurt afterward,” he said. “It hasn’t hurt in a year, and then just now, exactly a year after I killed him…”
“There were decades worth of memories dragged up at that ceremony,” interrupted Ron. “Everyone was talking about it. Even I thought I saw Fred sitting by George last night.” He paused and looked away for a moment. “It was great, but it was hard to remember everything that happened.” Hermione shivered, and he squeezed her tighter. “Especially when most of it happened to you.”
The hair on the back of Harry’s neck bristled. “Or because of you,” he finished.
“Don’t say that anymore, Harry,” snapped Hermione. “You know that’s not true. You sacrificed yourself for all of us.”
Harry found himself suddenly unable to meet her eyes. “You walked in knowing you were going to die, and you just stood there! Normal people don’t do that every day. Maybe your scar is going to hurt every twenty-first of May just because of that! You never know.”
Harry looked uncertainly toward Ron, who was nodding along with Hermione. “So neither of you think it could be…”
“Voldemort’s dead Harry,” said Ron firmly, and his ability to say the name without even the slightest grimace seemed to add to the finality of this statement.
“I know,” said Harry, “But there are a lot of bad wizards that are still out there.”
No one currently residing in the Black house needed to be reminded of this fact. Ron and Hermione had been by Harry’s side enough in the past five years to learn very well just how much he knew of the power of dark wizards. The past six months had only confirmed what he had been trying to tell the ministry since his first brush with them in his third year.
For the past six months, Harry had been directly involved in the tracking and capture of all those Death Eaters who would not turn themselves in. He had remembered every day what Dumbledore had once told him”that some of Voldemort’s Death Eaters were nearly as dangerous and powerful as Voldemort himself. Dumbledore’s words had been proven true in every confrontation. Harry had thought that the worst of Voldemort’s servants had been eliminated along with him in the final battle. Six months of disappointing dead ends, grueling nights without sleep, and horrifyingly bloody battles had shown him that he had been mistaken. Some grudgingly resigned themselves to capture after a chase, strangely terrified of a face to face confrontation with the only person who had twice survived a direct killing curse and defeated the most powerful dark wizard of this age before even completing his schooling.
Most, however, resisted with every force that they had. They used every Unforgivable Curse and dark vicious invention in an attempt to take as many aurors with them as possible. Harry had seen things during those battles that still kept him up some nights. Two aurors had been lost already, and three more very seriously injured. Harry had begun to understand exactly why Mad Eye had looked the way he did after a lifetime of pursuing dark wizards. In the end, he and Ron, together with the entire department of aurors, had sought and found nearly thirty more dark wizards.
“You’re also forgetting the reason your scar hurt in the first place.” Hermione’s voice brought him out of his reverie. “You and Voldemort were connected. You were his final horcrux. You've got no connection like that with any Death Eaters. There's no way you would be able to see into their minds."
“It was just a weird dream, Harry,” Ron said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Satisfied that his friends did not appear the slightest bit concerned, Harry excused himself to his room with the excuse that he needed the solitude to finish his essay. What he really needed to do was think. The ceremony at Hogwarts had brought back memories that Harry had gone to great lengths to bury. He needed some time to contemplate them and, if necessary, bury them again.
Harry had disappeared for three months after the final battle. He had stayed long enough to watch as Fred, Lupin, Tonks, Colin, Susan Bones, Justin Finch Fletchly, Katie Bell, and too many others were lowered silently into the ground. He had stayed that first sad night with the Weasleys, watching as, just like him, they bumbled about confused, shocked, and unable find any direction”occasionally finding a stray Skiving Snackbox and breaking off into tears.
Harry had been unable to sleep for days after everything that had happened. He had not been alone. He would watch each night as, one by one, each red head would disappear to their bedrooms, trying to sleep”pretending to sleep, but never really sleeping. Harry would hear them crying in the night”Ron sniffling quietly in the bed next to him, knowing that Harry was awake, but too overwhelmed with grief to care.
He would slip out those nights and walk. There was no destination”no thought in his head. There was only the slow constant pace that kept his thoughts from drifting back. Several times, when slipping out for one of his midnight walks, he heard muffled sobs through Ginny’s door. He would have given anything to be able to comfort her. Just a shoulder to cry on. That’s all she needed, but he found himself unable to do so. He couldn’t be there for her. He couldn’t say anything that she needed to hear. The fact was floating there somewhere in between them, making all of his intentions hollow. Ginny was missing a brother. Mrs. Weasley’s worse fear had come true. Teddy was an orphan. So many people were crying in the night at this very moment because of him. It had been Harry’s blood that had given Voldemort the power to return.
It was the weight of these thoughts more than anything else that had pushed him away one night about two weeks after the Battle for Hogwarts. He had wandered particularly far on one of his midnight walks when he had simply decided not to turn around. He had walked without stopping for the rest of the night, and a good part of the next day. Ron had come looking for him then. He had brought him his Firebolt and a bit of food that Mrs. Weasley had prepared for him, but he did not protest when Harry told him that he wasn’t coming back. Instead, his face had melted into a sad understanding, almost as if he had been thinking of doing the same thing.
Harry had apparated first to Godric’s Hollow to see the graves of his parents, and then to the mysterious seaside cave where he had last seen Dumbledore strong and commanding. He paid a visit to the cave on the edge of Hogsmeade, where Sirius had once spent half a year as a dog in order to keep an eye on Harry, and to the lighthouse in the middle of the sea where Hagrid had first revealed to him his true origins.
On it went for three months. Harry could not remember all of the places that he had gone, nor why he had thought them important enough to visit. He did not stop moving. He did not stop thinking. He did not wander with a purpose. He roamed instead with a line in one of his favorite muggle books repeating over and over in his head…
Not all those who wonder are lost.
His thoughts had been filled with the faces of the dead. Many times he had wished for the picture that Moody had given him of the old Order of the Phoenix. He had wanted to compare those faces with the ones that haunted his mind. It was to those faces that his mind turned now as he entered the room that had once belonged to his godfather. He was happy to see that Kreacher had not yet reached it with his new paint.
The album with the photo in it was in his closet next to Hedwig’s empty cage. He thought he had bought himself at least fifteen minutes to be able to look in relatively uninterrupted peace. He turned to the closet door hastily to get the album.
And found a wand aimed straight at his eye.
The Legacy of Four by spaniard
Chapter Notes: A return to Grimmauld Place and a not so welcome discovery.
Chapter Endnotes: Up next: The Black Back Door