Sometimes It's Good to be Bad

Chapter 52 Plans in Motion

When the morning arrived Harry was surprised to wake up in a room not his own before he looked down at the mess of curls on his chest and her remembered the previous night. Grinning to himself he started to stroke her hair absent-mindedly as he reminisced. It was the single best night of his life. After the war was over (hopefully soon) he would return the favor.

Ten minutes later she started to stir. Sitting up, she smiled at her new lover. When he also sat up and tried to kiss her, she pushed him away gently muttering something akin to "morning breath" only to have him attack her mouth with his. She gave into him, but not for long. When she pulled away she looked in his eyes. “I need to take a shower before breakfast, and you should do the same.”

“Perhaps I could join you?” he suggested.

“Sorry, I don’t think so Harry. I don’t think we’d get much showering done,” she answered suggestively. When he pouted at her, she laughed at him as she got out of the bed. “That won’t work, love.”

A half hour later the two were in the Great Hall eating breakfast. The rest of the Gryffindor seventh years that had dragged themselves out of bed were abuzz with the gossip that Harry had obviously stayed the night in the Head Girl’s room, as he had been missing from his own bed the entirety of the night. And they way they were acting, everyone could tell that they had shagged and it was definately something to talk about.

After they had eaten hardily they went up the the Headmistress’ office and flooed to Grimmauld Place. It took a few hours for everyone who was involved in the first stages of today’s plans to arrive and then another hour going over every scenario that could happen, despite the fact they had already done it at least twenty times over the past seven days.

At a half past three in the afternoon Harry and Hermione took an unauthorized portkey to the Riddle House. They landed ungracefully in the front garden which was completely overgrown since the caretaker had been murdered three years previous. Keeping low in the shrubbery they military crawled around the house to the back door and into the house after fifteen minutes of unspelling the wards of the door.

They tiptoed from room to room, careful to not leave any sign of their presence or make themselves known. When they felt that the ground floor was clear they climbed the stairs, charming them to not squeak under their weight, to the landing of the first floor. Taking a right turn they moved into the first room off of the hallway.

It was a bedroom that looked out of use and having gone into disrepair at least half a century previous. There was nothing remarkable about the room whatsoever, but Harry suddenly had the look of a feline stalking its prey. When Hermione gave him a questioning glance he held up a hand to keep the questions she wasn’t going to ask aloud at bay.

He crouched low while he continued walking forward, so slowly that the soft movements were almost impercievable. After five or six minutes he stopped at a wall whose paper had long since started peeling and put his ear against the grime the decades had summoned. His head started to bob, his eyes closed as his mouth was forming unheard words. It wasn’t long before he left the room with her following closely only to creep into the equally distraught space the next door down.

He motioned for Hermione to stay in the hall as he entered the room, going straight to the opposite side of the wall he had been probing from the last room. When Harry used his wand to lift the groaning double bed to show a large curled up snake peacefully sleeping, she gasped audibly. Harry’s hand moved under his cloak and brought out a glinting dagger, the blade fourteen inches long, a fuller on either side, the grip made out of carved ivory, the relief pattern showing from blood rubbed over its entirety.

The moment he lifted his arm to bring the dagger into the soft scales of the snake there was a loud ‘pop’ of apparation and a hand holding the dagger in its place in the air by the back of the blade. Harry’s body froze for a split second before he turned around seemingly in slow motion, though in reality it was only a blink of an eye. As he looked into the red eyes of the man who killed just about everything he loved, he used his only bit of wandless magic he had completely mastered to heat up the DA coin in his pocket to tell the first round of Order members to take their portkey to him and Hermione.

“I’m sorry, Harry Potter, but I cannot let you murder Nagini.” The high pitched voice was calm, as were the reptilian features his face still held from his rebirth. He showed no weakness to those around him.

“Well, Riddle, since you murdered my parents, and your minions murdered my godfather and my friends, it’s only fair.” Harry was ice incarnate, loathing oozing from every pore of his body.

“Ah, that may be so, but I have never been known to play fair, now have I?” he chuckled faintly as the boy stared up at him.

It was at this moment that the portkey of Order members arrived into the room, as it was keyed into Harry’s location, wherever that may be. They swarmed the room, wands pointed at their adversary, shouting for him to let go of the blade and back away from their saviour.

He Who Must Not Be Named put his wand to his left arm to call a group of his Death Eaters to him. The people who were brandishing their wands towards him were now throwing off spells left and right, but every one was deflected by an invisible protection bubble surrounding his person via Hermione who was yet to be noticed still standing in the doorway.

When Harry had seen the serpentine figure he was meant to kill put his wand to his arm, Harry had used the same wandless magic to call the rest of the reserves to the fight that was sure to soon ensue. At the same moment all those summoned arrived in the room, causing it to burst at the seams.