It’s a Thursday afternoon in February, and if Harry finishes three more reports he can go get a gelato from the shop down the road.

This is his life now, this sad little bargaining system he’s set up with himself: do your work and get a treat, like he’s a spoiled kid, or a dog with an incontinence problem. He’s pretty sure that by twenty five you’re supposed to have worked out how to just do boring stuff because it needs doing, and not because you’ve promised yourself ice cream. It’s not as though there’s anyone that he can ask, though, without tipping his hand vis-a-vis his own motivational methods, so there is the possibility that everyone does this, and he’s not odd or abnormal at all. He doesn’t think it’s very likely, but possible is enough to be getting on with—

—and he’s spent three minutes he could have been writing the report on the Siddlebaum case thinking about the damn ice cream. Harry stares down at the swimming mass of demanding questions and half-written answers on his form and wishes that someone woulde hit him or threaten his life or try to burn headquarters down or something. Give him something else to do.

The ear-splitting crack that rents the air is a surprise, and gives Harry half a heart attack thinking he can actually summon evil at will before he looks up and sees:

“Kreacher?” Harry says, his voice cracking. He casts a quick cleaning charm over his glasses without taking them off, but when he blinks through clear lenses the elf’s still there, as knobbled and bug-eyed as Harry remembers him. His outfit is different—and is that a name tag?—but the face is so familiar Harry couldn’t possibly mistake him.

“HARRY POTTER,” Kreacher wails, throwing himself at Harry’s feet. Harry stares down at him, horrified—he’d been afraid of something like this seven years ago, when he first sold the place, but after all this time he just sort of assumed Kreacher was fine with the whole thing. It’s not as though there’d ever been much love lost between them; whatever truce they managed to form towards the end there, Harry was sure at the time that Kreacher would be happiest under a master of the house who didn’t actively want to die a little every time he stepped across the threshold.

“Er,” says Harry. “Hi, Kreacher. What’s—”

“Harry Potter muste at once,” Kreacher says, tone urgent, wide eyes staring up at Harry filled with tears. “The Master is in trouble and Kreacher cannot fix it, Kreacher tried, Kreacher tried to disarm them but they hit Kreacher, and Master told Kreacher to get to safety and Kreacher cannot disobey the Master!” He stands and wrings his little hands, bouncing from foot to foot in his agitation. “Kreacher is not even sure he should be here except—Master cannot protect himself and the children and the artifacts and the house. So much precious history in Kreacher’s hands and Kreacher has failed, failed!” He bursts into hupping sobs and slides back down to the floor, clearly too ovee to continue.

“Oi,” says Ron, poking his head over his own cubicle into Harry’s, “I heard something, is everything—bloody hell, is that Kreacher?”

“Who’s armed?” Harry demands of Kreacher, ignoring Ron. “Who hit you? What children? You tell me what you’re talking about right now!”

“The thieves!” Kreacher cries, and howls, pounding his fists on the floor. “The thieves at Number 12 Grimmauld Place! Harry Potter muste and save us!” He freezes, his whole body aquiver, and then sobs out, “Oh no, they are hurting the drawing room,” before he vanishes abruptly with a crack identical to the first one.

Harry and Ron share a long look over the top of their cubicles before they separate; Ron to gather a proper team, and Harry to grab his cloak, wand and rucksack and head for the door.

It urs to Harry, as he walks grimly out to the Apparition point on the sidewalk in front of the Ministry, that this might be a trick, a trap. It, after all, wouldn’t be the first time Kreacher fed him misinformation to get him somewhere, and now that Harry thinks about it, he doesn’t actually know who he sold the house to. It’d been purchased through a holdingpany, but Harry’s lawyer at the time had assured him it was a perfectly respectable buyer who even had some blood ties to the property. That had been more than enough for Harry. He’d been so relieved to get the place off his hands that it hadn’t mattered much to him who got it.

It’s only now that he’s bothering to consider the fact that anyone with blood ties to the old Black house might well be an unsavory sort of character. But Kreacher said there were armed thieves, said there were children; Harry can’t take the chance of not going, and, anyway, he doesn’t want to. He Apparates to a destination he hasn’t thought of in years, and underneath the teeth-gritting, crushing press of traveling this way, Harry feels excitement spread warm through his body, his heart pounding a lion’s roar in his chest. This might be the only part of his job that he actually likes, but by god, he likes it enough to make up for the rest of it.

He has to, or his whole life’s a fucking joke.

Harry lands at the front gate and stumbles a bit, breath stolen at how different Number 12 looks from his last memory. Where it once had been dark and foreboding, sketched out bleak against the landscape in drab blacks and greys, the place is now almost cheerful, the black-shingled roof and wrought iron detailing offset with white paint and enting green shutters. A carved wooden sign, about four feet high, is embedded in the grass next to the walkway up to the house. It reads “The Modern Museum of Wizarding History, Est. 1999.”

Harry stares at it blankly until a crashing noise from inside the house, followed by something that sounds a lot like Kreacher howling, jerks him back to reality. He runs up the front stairs and through the door that’s been left hanging open, and it bes clear to him that whatever else this might be, it isn’t any kind of trick—he knows too well what a house looks and sounds like when it’s been invaded by those uninvited. The first floor is wrecked, glass exhibit cases in shatters, chairs overturned with half their stuffing out and the wallpaper hanging loose in strips, but it’s all clearly very recent damage. Harry thinks distantly that even like this it looks better than the last time he saw it, but he doesn’t have time to focus on that right now. He can hear footsteps upstairs, at least three sets, maybe four, and the sounds of spellwork, crashing and ripping and something that might be a pleading voice.

Quickly, Harry pulls his Invisibility Cloak out of his bag and yanks it on. Underneath its silvery cover he climbs as fast as he’s able to the second floor, taking care to avoid the steps and specific spots of floorboard he remembers as being creaky. Memory’s a fickle thing, though, and when he gets to the top of the flight he almost puts his foot down on the only stair he’s ever encountered with a bloodlust, having blocked out its existence more than otten about it. He’s stopped just in time by a little sign on a stick that pops up out of its center.

“Careful,” the sign reads, “I bite!” And then there’s a little drawing of a stair with huge fangs biting down on a somehow helpless-looking ankle. Harry strangles back a laugh at the strangeness and hops over it, landing soft and soundless on the balls of his feet. He creeps over to the door of the parlor, where the footsteps and voices areing from.

Draco Malfoy, of all bloody people, is sitting with his legs crossed on the floor.

For a second, Harry sees red, fully prepared to burst in and Petrificus Totalis the bastard, read him the riot act about how Harry did not testify at his bloody trial so he could be here, robbing museums and terrorizing house elves, less than a decade down the line. His better judgment takes over his prejudice, though, and he draws in a deep breath and sees the desperation in Malfoy’s face, the obvious terror in the set of his shoulders, the way his hands are behind his back and probably bound—he’s a hostage, Harry realizes. The primary hostage, Harry realizes. This must be his house, Harry realizes.

He sold Grimmauld Place to Draco Malfoy, Harry realizes, and briefly considers just turning around and letting Ron and the backup team handle this one.

He notices the children then, though, huddled behind Malfoy and all probably under the age of ten. One of them, a little girl with light eyes and skin the same warm brown tone as Harry’s, is leaning against Malfoy’s upper arm, would obviously be clutching at it if her hands weren’t bound behind her back. There’s a woman with them, too, pretty and young and dark-haired; she looks like she’s been crying.

All thoughts of turning around otten, Harry slips in through the half-open door and gets a look at their intruders. Three men and a woman, all with the tell-tale shimmer of a recently applied glamour, all holding wands. Two of the men are thick in the neck, shoulders and arms, with the wide stances of professional grunts; the third is slight, almost delicate, with a restless, twitchy sort of look to the way he’s pacing back and forth across the room. The woman with them is of average build, neither fat nor thin, and sitting with her legs crossed on a marble-topped desk that looks at least a century old.

She smiles lazily at Malfoy, spinning her wand around between two fingers. “What’ll it be, Mr. Malfoy?” she says, her voice dripping with false sweetness. “Do you want to tell us where it is, or shall we be forced to search this room like we’ve searched the others?”

One of the grunts holds his fist menacingly over a glass case housing a fragile-looking crystal vase. Malfoy’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly, but his voice betrays nothing but haughty exasperation as he spits, “As I have said a dozen times, I haven’t the faintest notion of what it is you’re looking for. If I did, I would certainly have told you where to find it by now, but as

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