Harry was sitting at his desk in his study carefully inscribing runes onto the surface of a glass vial when his alarms went off. The sudden blaring startled him and his hand slipped ruining the rune. With a curse, he tossed the vial down and wondered, not for the first time, if he should not be using the Protean charm instead. It was far easier to cast and of course, it would be a lot faster to cast a charm instead of hand etching all the runes he needed to enchant the vials. Still, the method he was using was far more permanent and dependable than the protean charm.
He turned to his monitors and saw that Dumbledore had apparated onto his street again. Damn and blast the man, he hoped he had seen the last of the man but clearly, that was not the case.
What on earth was the man doing, he wondered, as he saw Dumbledore cast notice-me-not charms on the Street sign and the Address Plaques displaying the house numbers on his house and all the other houses on the street.
Then with a flash of phoenix fire he saw two more people appear on his street, a dark haired man and a woman whose hair still looked a bit bushy, albeit to a far lesser extent than how it had appeared in school. Suddenly it all made sense. Dumbledore had clearly found a loophole in the contract he had forced the man to sign. Bugger! The man had brought Sirius Black and Hermione Granger to his house. How... How dare he? Did he really think that Harry was so easy to manipulate. That all he had to do was trot out a few people from his past and Harry would fall into line. It was quite insulting is what it was.
He had to think very carefully about how he was going to handle this. He had to send a clear message to Dumbledore that he was not the kind of person that would take such a blatant violation of their agreement lying down.
"Bob," he called out. A second later Dobby popped into the room with a loud crack.
"Yes, Master Harry," he cried.
Harry sighed, "You're slipping back into bad habits Dobby, please remember - I'm Jim and you're Bob. Just because Luna knows who I am now is no reason to start relaxing on security. Now what do you call me?"
"Jim," said Dobby in a slightly sulky tone, well only as sulky as Dobby could possible be which wasn't much. The problem was he hated having to use an alias for Harry. He much preferred to call him something grandiose like Master, The Great Harry Potter etc. etc.
Harry sighed again; he absolutely hated having to correct Dobby in any way. The elf had been a loyal companion and his best friend for far too many years. "Anyway," he said, "Dumbledore's here again, so could you do me a favour and pop over to Luna and let her know to stay out of the way, I have to go deal with an interfering old man. After you tell Luna, could you please wait in the basement?"
"And what should I say if Missy Luna asks what you are planning on doing," asked Dobby.
Harry smirked, "Tell her I'm going for the Shock and Awe option," he said.
"Aah, Missy Luna is probably not going to like that. She won't want you to do anything dangerous," warned Dobby before he popped away.
.....
Dumbledore was a happy man that day. His plans were coming to fruition. Sirius and Hermione had both turned up at the scheduled time. He'd had to suffer impatiently through their reunion. Sirius remembered Hermione quite fondly as the girl who had inexplicably decided to rescue him by flying a Hippogriff up to the tower in which he had been imprisoned and was very happy to see her again after so many years. He had had to stop himself several times from snapping at them to hurry up. They would have plenty of time to reminisce later after... but they didn't know that.
Part of him wondered at the capacity of the human mind to paper over the cracks and gaps in their memories. Without Harry, so many of their past actions made absolutely no sense. How for example did Hermione explain staying with the Weasleys at Grimauld Place during her summer holidays that year that Harry disappeared? Without being able to remember Harry, she would have had no reason to have ever visited Sirius. How had Sirius explained coming back to England after escaping at the end of Harry's third year? There were dozens of instances like that in both their lives.
Still, none of that really mattered, not any more. He had them where he wanted them and soon...
A brief flutter of anxiety crossed his mind. Disappointingly, neither of the two had shown any signs of missing Britain. Would they really... No, he would not get discouraged, not now, not when he was so close. They would help him convince Harry. They would.
He had gone first, of course, as he needed to make sure that Sirius and Hermione would not be able to tell where they were. Now all he had to do was wait a few more moments and, yes, there they were, right on time.
Sirius and Hermione were both looking around at where they had landed. Sirius took one look at the house they were standing in front of and his mouth fell open in astonishment. He took out his wand and waved it around in front of him.
"Wow," he said. "This place has some serious freaking wards. I don't think I've ever seen so many... Bloody hell! Who lives here?"
"I was not aware that you had much experience with wards, Sirius," said Dumbledore.
"Growing up somewhere as heavily warded as Grimmauld Place you tend to develop a feel for them, well, it's not like I can literally see them or anything but bloody hell I can certainly tell they're there. Feels sort of like a buzzing in your teeth, you know. Also, back at Hogwarts you'd be surprised how many of our pranks involved getting past some kind of wards. At least in the later years. Plus, I have a drinking buddy back home in Brazil who talks about them all the bloody time. I've had to upgrade the wards on my house several times after he told me about vulnerabilities in some of the more commonly used warding schemes," explained Sirius.
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