Something Better Than This

Chapter 6: Mirror, Mirror

Harry knew perfectly well that he ought to be visiting the Dursleys, but he kept putting it off. He also ought to be searching for Horcruxes, but he was reaching the uneasy conclusion that he didn't know where to start. It would have been nice if Dumbledore had had a chance to share more of his methods -- not just Voldemort's acquisition of his "souvenirs," but how he'd gone about locating them. Even if one of them hadn't been there, which wasn't encouraging either.

The ring's location had evidently been a deduction, as Voldemort had stored it in the same place he got it, and the false locket had been in another place Voldemort had considered significant, but not where he'd obtained it. Harry couldn't think of too many other places Voldemort would have considered suitable souvenirs -- except Hogwarts itself, and he didn't like that thought at all.

Something else told him it was wrong, too. Voldemort had never controlled Hogwarts, not really. Dumbledore had always been there. The Gaunts' hovel, the cave, those were places where Voldemort had been in control and had tormented and humbled somebody weaker than himself.

He spent more than one night in an uneasy dream of Kreacher prancing about in filthy green robes and clashing together mirrored cymbals that reflected everything else in weird distorted shapes. The house-elf would caper about and wrap himself in ragged curtains, drink from Hufflepuff's cup... a heavy golden locket hung on his scrawny chest, weighing him down. When Dobby showed up and they began wrestling and pulling ears over the various items, Harry woke up and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then jumped out of bed and shook Ron. "Ron, wake up!"

"Mrffshuh?" Ron roused groggily, looked around the room, and buried his head back in the pillow. "Not morning yet."

"We need to go back to Sirius's house," Harry told him. "I think I saw one of the Horcruxes there."

"What?" Ron sat up, shaking his head. "How d'you mean?"

"We found a locket there. I didn't know it was anything special or worse than anything else there, but it was gold instead of silver and it had a fancy S on it. Maybe R. A. B. was a Black! Or maybe they got it away from him, I don't know."

"All right," Ron said. "All right. We can go." He rubbed his eyes. "Do you want to go now? It's four in the morning."

Harry looked at the clock. "Er... it can wait. Sorry."

Rather to his surprise, Harry went back to sleep and did not have any more dreams of cackling house-elves, which was a great relief.

When he explained his latest recollection to Hermione, she frowned. Somehow Harry was not surprised.

"Are you sure you can get in?" she asked.

"Well," Harry said, rather taken aback, "I did inherit it."

"Yes," Hermione said darkly, "and Kreacher."

"I don't know what else you want me to do with him," Harry muttered. "I can't exactly let him run off to Bellatrix Lestrange."

Hermione sighed. "I know. But Kreacher isn't really the point. Do you know what kind of defensive spells you'll have to get past or deactivate? I mean, ones that might be supposed to keep anyone other than the rightful owner out, not just all the nasty leftover pieces of things that wouldn't cooperate even with... even with Sirius." She blinked and frowned again suddenly. "For that matter, do you even have a key? I assume there's a lock and not just spells, and I don't know that I'd expect Alohomora to work!"

"All right," said Harry, "that is a good point. And I told Dumbledore that the Order could still use it, and I don't know whether they did or not."

"It could even still be under Fidelius," Hermione said quietly.

Harry frowned at that. "Well, if it is, we're all still in on the secret." He paused. "Wait. What happens if the Secret-Keeper dies? Does the charm just end?"

"That'd be pretty pointless, wouldn't it?" Ron shook his head. "I don't know all about how it works. It's not exactly a common spell. But I don't think somebody can get around it just by finding out and killing the Secret-Keeper. Too easy. You hear about Secret-Keepers being captured and tortured, not just killed outright."

"You're cheerful," Harry said. "Anyway, if there's a key to it, or other spells I need to know about that came with the house or got added by the Order...."

"Someone still has to know," Ron finished for him. "So who do you need to talk to?"

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According to Mrs. Weasley, who screwed up her face and looked pained at the mention of 12 Grimmauld Place, Harry needed to talk to Remus Lupin. She obligingly invited him over and deposited him and Harry in a small, quiet room with a variety of warmed-up leftovers, evidently feeling that this was to be a grueling conversation that required nourishment. Either that or she still felt that both of them needed feeding up.

"Yes," said Lupin, "you should be able to get in. The Order hasn't been back there as much for a while, though it's still technically under Fidelius as headquarters."

"Are you the new Secret-Keeper?" Harry asked.

Lupin shook his head with a self-deprecatory smile. "No, I'm not. Do you think you need to know who is?"

Harry considered this. "Would you tell me if I said yes?"

"It is your house."

"Wish it weren't." Harry sighed. "Just what I need to do to get in, please."

Lupin gave him a brief but thorough explanation of the security measures on the house. Harry committed them carefully to memory and accepted a large old key that looked as if it might twist around and bite.

They decided not to fly to Grimmauld Place. Instead, with Harry's assurance that it was really not that different from regular Apparition, Hermione tried out Side-Along Apparition. They started out sensibly enough by going across an open field out back of the Burrow.

"It's just the same as without us," Harry insisted. "Well, except that you do want to think of bringing us along."

Hermione tried to shove her hair out of her face with the arm Harry was holding. "Ow. I don't see how I'm supposed to be able to pivot like this at all!"

She stepped forward, trying to turn. Harry and Ron shuffled hastily around her in an attempt to make this easier and discovered that they were otherwise still in the same place.

"Where in the turn do you usually disappear?" Ron asked.

"You've done it," Hermione said irritably. "You ought to know."

"Well, for all I know it's getting to the wrong bit of the turn that makes you leave eyebrows behind," Ron retorted.

"No, it's a lack of concentration. You almost had it, really; I'm sure you'll get it next time. You're going with Harry to the summer test, aren't you? There's one on the first of August, by the way."

"Yes, I know there is, and yes, I'm going!"

"Good!" With that, Hermione strode determinedly forward, wrenched around -- and they were across the field, staggering slightly.

Harry spat out a springy lock of Hermione's flyaway hair. "I think you've got it."

They went back to collect a few useful items, including Harry's Invisibility Cloak (which he stuffed into a pocket) and some Shield Gloves he'd bought while wandering through Weasley Wizarding Wheezes, which seemed likely to be useful for handling the items in the old Black house.

Harry frowned at his pair of gloves for a long moment, thinking of a music box, but he had to leave Ginny out of this.

The three of them arrived in an alley where Hermione said she had been brought by Portkey nearly two years ago and strolled up to the juncture between numbers 11 and 13.

Number 12 was not there.

Harry frowned at the lack of a gap or any other sign, doubt beginning in his stomach, and then stepped deliberately forward.

The Black house squeezed into existence, and with a relieved sigh, they all trooped up to the door. Harry put the excessively toothy key Lupin had given him into the lock and twisted it, putting a good bit of his weight on it as the bolt slid grindingly back. At his first try it didn't seem to have worked, but the second time he turned the doorknob, he felt a sort of jolt deep inside it, and it opened under his hand.

He let the other two in and shut the door very quietly, not wanting to wake the portrait of Mrs. Black, and then looked around.

If the house had felt dying before, now it really did feel dead. Dust drifted in the air, and something that looked like broken glass and sand crunched under their feet, as if someone had shattered an hourglass.

"I did think the Order wouldn't have left quite this much of a mess," Hermione muttered, eyeing the floor with distaste.

"Maybe it was Mundungus," murmured Harry. He took a few more steps forward, and there was a loud crack as his foot fell on a larger piece of glass he hadn't seen.

At once, a loud, horrible wail rose from Mrs. Black's painting. The curtains over it were thrown back, but they bunched up and rose to meet her painted fists as if she were tearing them in despair and rage. "My son, my son! My sons are dead and you pollute the house of my fathers!"

"Your son willed me this house," Harry said, going over to face the portrait. "And I won't have you insulting his decision or my friends."

"Shame of my flesh! I have no son."

"Not anymore, you don't," Harry said. Then, on impulse, he added, "I miss him too."

Mrs. Black looked at him with staring eyes, but to his astonishment, she shut up.

After a moment, Harry closed the curtains gently and went back to Ron and Hermione. "I don't quite like splitting up here," he said, "even with the gloves." He took his pair out of his pocket and pulled them over his hands. "It's going to take an awfully long time to search otherwise, though."

"We can start with wherever you saw the locket," Ron suggested. "And maybe Kreacher's nest...."

None of the places Harry thought he might have seen the locket turned out to contain it, from the grumpy jewelry cabinet where it had been found to any of the remaining garbage bags they found. Kreacher's nest yielded only a great deal of dirt, insects, stains, and a material that Hermione, looking green, insisted on calling guano. Ron said he knew Kreacher was batty, but this was going too far, and in spite of his earlier caution about splitting up Harry found himself drifting away during the ensuing argument.

He tried one wing of the house where he hadn't gone before. A few bags of rubbish lay lumpily on the floor in a few rooms, but he didn't think they looked like very likely hiding places for the locket, really. He'd seen the locket; it shouldn't have wandered off to another part of the house entirely -- though he wouldn't be too surprised if it had wandered out of the house entirely. But why just move it?

Harry tried Alohomora on a locked door, with a small and surprisingly unassuming plaque on the outside stating that it led to the "Trophy Room," and was a little surprised when the spell worked -- and then regretted it, as he stuck his head inside and promptly gagged at the smell. It wasn't exactly of rotting flesh, but it was moldy fur and closed places and something else ugly and disquieting. He pinched his nose shut to breathe through his mouth, which just made the back of his throat taste foul, and peered around.

It didn't look like the Hogwarts trophy room. There were no gleaming cups or plaques here. This was a room of hunting trophies, but the mounted heads and bodies looked strange... many of them appeared to have lost much of their fur, and that tall, furry thing, one of the few that was still furry, didn't look as if it had been mounted at all naturally; Harry wasn't sure if it should have been on two legs or four, but was fairly certain it couldn't have generally gone about twisted to the side and with its arm bent out sideways at the elbow. He moved a little closer and realized it was a half-transformed werewolf.

Harry went out and slammed the door.

He hadn't been up to Sirius's room much, but he knew where it was. It didn't look as if anybody else had gone there much since Sirius had died, either. There had perhaps been a few halfhearted efforts at tidying up, but there were a couple of Firewhisky bottles by one wall and the bed remained unmade. A large spider sat on one of the pillows.

Harry went over to shoo it away. It didn't shoo very far, only over to one corner of the room, near the drapes on the window. It appeared to have had a good haul in its silken net; there was even something only mostly wrapped up that looked rather distinctly like a doxy.

"Good job," Harry told it. He didn't go near the curtains. He did, on impulse, pull the bedcovers up straight -- and had to duck when a doxy flew out of them. Luckily there was only the one, and it crashed into the thick spiderweb, tearing it badly but tangling itself worse. The spider pounced.

Harry straightened up and lifted the pillow. His hand had slipped just under the edge to strike something hard and cool; he couldn't think why Sirius might sleep with the locket under his pillow, and rather thought he would have been more likely to have thrown it away, but perhaps Kreacher had chosen this hiding place....

It wasn't the amulet.

It was the mirror to which Harry had the mate.

Sirius had slept with that under his pillow. Waiting.

Harry stared at it until Ron and Hermione came looking for him. Hermione gently tugged him away from the bed, out to the clear space in the middle of the floor; Ron picked up the mirror and handed it to him before they left.

When they got home, he went straight to his trunk and dug out the broken pieces he'd never taken out of it; he fit them together like a puzzle, cried, "Reparo!" and watched the fragments of glass and metal meld together.

Then he went downstairs and gave one to Ginny, accompanied by the story of how stupid he'd been. "I won't forget about it again," he finished. "If you want, you can use one to check on us... or if we run into more trouble than we can handle, we can use it to yell for help."

"I hope you aren't expecting to have to call for help from the Dursleys' this time."

A grin broke through the thoughts of Sirius. "Well, I can Apparate away now. Just not legally. And Ron and Hermione are coming."

"I could too, you know. Visiting your aunt and uncle isn't exactly hunting for Voldemort. At least, I hope not."

"Yeah," Harry said, "but do you really want to meet Dudley that much?"

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