A teenage boy was sitting on a swirl chair behind an ornate desk in his study, looking out of the floor to ceiling windows. A bejewelled diadem was sitting on top of his head as he occasionally closed and opened his eyes.
The election for the Minister of Magic had gone very well. Sure, there had been bumps along the way and they had wondered if they could succeed, but it had worked. Owning the Magical Daily had certainly helped. Harry's anger at Albus Dumbledore increased when he remembered everything the old man had done to prevent Sirius from becoming Minister. Dumbledore really was an outstanding politician but the problem was that he expected everyone to behave the same way. In the political sphere, two people may be opponents, stabbing each other in the back one day, but they may become the greatest allies a month later. Dumbledore obviously thought Harry would do the same.
Wrong . Harry would never forget. He couldn't describe the number of problems Dumbledore had caused Sirius over the past two months. The aged mage was also responsible for Sirius' incarceration, him being abandoned at the Dursleys and Harry was pretty sure there was something shady about his parents' going under the Fidelius Charm as well. Even the prophecy brought about warning bells. He made a note to hear the entire contents of the prophecy sometime. He had wanted to go during the summer, but with everything that had happened, he had been too busy.
What were those escaped Death Eaters after? Were they trying to bring Voldemort back? How did they know that he was alive in the first place? Nobody knew about Voldemort's Horcruxes, right? That's what the Dark Lord thought anyway. He didn't know that Harry now had a lot of information about that.
The Diadem of Ravenclaw was really the best thing that had ever happened to Harry. His training and knowledge in all fields in magic were improving by leaps and bounds. Tom Riddle in his youth had taken to studying all forms of magic. Voldemort had later improved upon that by travelling around the world and learning magic from different people. While it was true that Harry was still learning the N.E.W.T. material from the memories, he spent more time skimming through them to get information on Horcruxes.
The first Horcrux, the diary, given to Lucius Malfoy had been destroyed. The cup of Helga Hufflepuff given to Bellatrix, which was safely kept in the Lestrange family vault at Gringotts, had been retrieved and the soul piece destroyed. The Diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, which had been kept in the Room of Requirement, had been retrieved and the soul piece destroyed. That only left the Gaunt ring and Salazar Slytherin's locket, both of which were extremely well protected. He knew that he should be doing this with Sirius, but he didn't want to put his godfather in needless danger. Sirius would also not approve of Harry's methods, he knew that. Besides, Sirius was still in a high of winning the election and was enjoying a quiet evening with his family. Dylan was at Greengrass Manor, so Harry had time.
Placing the Diadem back securely in a small vault, Harry walked out of the study and made his way to the dungeons of Potter Castle. The sun had nearly set by now and the dungeons looked menacing under the dim lighting charms. Not breaking stride, Harry simply disabled the wards on the doors with a few flicks of his wand. Several minutes later, the door to the room which housed some of the prison cells opened.
"Hello, family," said Harry with a dark smirk on his face. "Long time no see."
In front of him behind bars were the weak, frail forms of Vernon, Petunia and Marge Dursley.
Once Harry had realised back in his first year that Dumbledore had an unusual interest in the Dursleys, doing his best to force Harry back to their house, he had taken a bold step. Dumbledore had still been his guardian then, and Harry really did not want to take any chances. How could the old man force him to return to Privet Drive if the Dursleys no longer lived there?
House-Elves were really useful creatures. They were extremely loyal to their masters and lived for much longer than witches and wizards. Their loyalty, once earned by a witch or wizard, was something which was extremely valuable. The Potters and the Blacks had known this. Once upon a time, they had used this to their advantage. The Blacks, being the ever politicians, used to send their house-elves to spy on people. They had an outstanding idea on how to do that. They opened a shop, not in Diagon Alley, but in one of the other smaller shopping districts in Magical Britain and similar ones all over Magical Europe. The company would let families hire house-elves to do their job and pay money to the company for their services. Since not all families had elves, it worked amazingly well. No one realised that the Blacks owned the company. It had been skillfully hidden by a mountain of paperwork and aliases. By the sixteenth century, the Blacks' information gathering skills were unparalleled by anyone in Europe. Using intimidation and blackmail, they had been the power behind the throne in the country. That was the reason generations of Blacks considered themselves close to royalty.
The Potters, on the other hand, did not care about politics. Someone from the family would always be present at the Wizengamot, as it was their duty, but it was not something they focussed on until Lord Charlus Potter, Harry's grandfather, took his seat. Unlike the Blacks, who used the house-elves for information, the Potters used them to raid the homes of their enemies. The family was notorious for their obsession with wards and they had used that to their best advantage.
The Potters had always been wealthy, but they wouldn't have become one of the richest families in the world if they hadn't plundered the fortunes of several families all over Europe and beyond. Using a combination of runes and stealth spells, they gave their house-elves power to help them in their raids. Rich, snobby purebloods who had opposed the Potters and their business deals soon found their large fortunes gone, leaving them destitute, and the best part of it all was that no one ever connected it to the Potters.
In fact, the Potters had even taken advantage of the Muggle English civil war, stealing plenty of royal gold and treasures in the process, and the same was done again during the Muggle French Revolution. Between the huge amounts of money they got through robbing their enemies, combined with their smart business tactics and magical innovations, they controlled a lot of international trade around the world.
That was, of course, until they were brought down to their knees after the Potter Massacre. The family business of robbing enemies had been tucked away, never to be used again. They began managing their very large fortune instead. They had taken a massive beating after the massacre and had never recovered from that. The house-elves went back to serving the family, not being asked to help in raids anymore.
Karma . It all came down to Karma. All those centuries later, the Black and Potter families took one hit after another, nearly being driven extinct in the process, losing a good chunk of their power with it - until Harry Potter and Sirius Black took their positions as the heads of their respective families.
Using the house-elves again, this time pooling their resources, they had ensured that their elves could not be tracked as they sent them to spy on people. While the other families who had house-elves of their own were quite difficult to spy on, not to mention many had developed anti-elf wards to protect themselves from wizards who could use Elvin Apparition to enter their homes, that was not to say that it was useless. The runes and enchantments developed by the Potters to hide the elf's magical signature may be quite old, but it was still ingenious. That was how Sirius had gotten enough information to blackmail his opponents in addition to the information his family had collected over the centuries.
And that was also how Harry had kidnapped the Dursleys. There was no way he was not going to exact revenge for all that they had put him through when he had been under their care. He wanted them to suffer as he had suffered.
"How has it been to live here for the last two years?" smirked Harry.
"YOU!" bellowed Vernon. "You're the one keeping us here? Let us out, boy, now!"
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