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Hogwarts
–Damian Hawthorne–
"Tommy?"
There was silence, with no sign of the eccentric House Elf popping up anytime soon, and the only reason he did not ask a second time was because of the conditions inside the castle. Judging by Tommy's behaviour, he was mostly certain that he held an important position in the House Elf coalition, if there was even one, and more importantly, Dumbledore knew about it.
If he was not coming here or sending someone with the same name like he did last time, then it either meant that he was dead, which sent a wave of sadness through him, or it meant that he was busy and had just resisted his call, which was possible.
He certainly did not want Tommy to just pop out of a meeting with Dumbledore and appear in front of him, especially since the only reason he had managed to escape from Dumbledore's watch was that Tommy was lying by omission. If he were asked a question directly, by the Headmaster no less, he would not be able to lie, thus exposing his activities.
No. It was far better that Tommy did not come. Though, that just left him with nothing to do, no way to gather information directly from the source. He would have to find out just like everyone else, like plebs. He pointed his finger at Terry and cast the Rennervate spell, instantly waking the boy up with a gasp.
"Relax," He said dryly, his gaze fixed on the roof as he lay on his bed, "You must have had a bad dream."
"Huh?" Terry said, confused. He chuckled internally at the poor boy's confusion as he rubbed his eyes and went to the washroom to freshen up. Meanwhile, quite literally almost dying of boredom, he stood up and went down to the Common Room. While he knew that good books would be a rarity now, what with the entire House now crammed into the common room, he still wanted something to read.
Maybe the newspapers had something interesting. Not hoping for much, but needing something to pass the time, he went down, and yup, it was as he expected. The entire common room was full of people just reading something. The seniors sat on the couches, the rest on cushions, on conjured chairs, and the rest on the floor, but all of them remained there as they all continued to read.
Truly, this was the Ravenclaw house. Even if there was no other identification in the entire common room, this sight alone should be enough to tell everyone what the house was. Shaking his head, he headed to the one section in the shelf that was not empty.
The newspaper section.
He snorted, seeing the Daily Prophet sitting on the table, and picked it up. And there it was, the front page headline. One dead, two critically injured, plastered on the front page, along with some very insidiously phrased questions below the headline.
Something along the line of throwing shade at Dumbledore, his conduct, his faculty, and his many titles reducing his time spent at Hogwarts, which basically accused Dumbledore of neglect when it came to nurturing the next generation of wizards, which was basically treason when it came to the wizarding world.
He wondered why Dumbledore did not just throw the book of law at them, with his full power behind it. If not for complete shutdown, he should at least be able to divest the entire newspaper ownership, turning it into a more neutral newspaper, and then he was reminded of the many, many issues Dumbledore could solve about Magical Britain if only he had the will for it.
It reminded him of Dumbledore's age and how he had gone soft. He might have grown in power since his fight with Grindelwald, but he had a hunch that his spirit had only grown weaker since then. Constant second chances, ideology over results, and constantly being on the back foot had resulted in Tommy boy gaining far more power than should be possible.
He was sure that even that fight was fought with one hand behind his back, right up until Tommy boy grew in power to somewhat match Dumbledore. Then, Dumbledore, being capable of halting Tommy boy, should have ordered his followers to deal devastating damage to the Death Eaters, but he did not. Instead, he had them fighting with their killing ability crippled, which just led to more and more deaths overall.
Taking a deep breath, he stopped going over the stupidity of Dumbledore in the past two decades, as fully writing it down would require a book, and he was just down here to read.
Flipping past the first page, he was about to read the second page, only to freeze for a moment, as he flipped the page back and looked at the headline once more.
Setting the newspaper down, he looked up, as if cursing the heavens for his luck. He resisted the urge to slap his forehead as he took the power and went upstairs. Normally, this was frowned upon as students did not care much about their books as they should when they took the books to their dorms, or as the prefects thought, but since it was just the Daily Prophet, all he got was a few side eyes, but no one was stopping him. It was really not worth the paper it was printed on, especially for students who appreciated rote theory far more than sensational reporting.
Opening the door, he saw that Terry had fallen asleep once more, snoring lightly. He sat on his bed, looking at the newspaper and going through the motion of flipping the pages until something interesting caught his eye.
In reality, his mind was on another thing entirely. In the spirit of gaining trust with Sirius Black and also because the dude just deserved it, he had given Sirius a daily subscription of multiple newspapers, international and domestic.
He had not yet cracked the teleporting enchantments, especially without a human mind to pilot it, but he had hacked together a mechanism to get regular shipments to the Lair without teleporting anything. As it turns out, once you have given someone enough money, they were more than happy to collect all the newspapers that were publicly sold in Britain, and deliver them inside what looked like a PO box, and go on their merry way.
Half bloods who were essentially given the worst of both worlds, i.,e, not fully accepted in the magical side but utterly unprepared to deal with the chaos that was the Muggle world, were far easier to convince, especially with a fat paycheck, to not care about what happened with the papers.
It helped that it was just papers and not, say, weaponry or surveillance on people.
After the newspapers were delivered inside the PO box, they were sucked through the base of the box, into the ground, right into a waiting drone of sorts, that had all the stealth enchantment he could give it.
That's right, he had invented the world's first magical drone, slightly autonomous, capable of traversing hundreds of miles without stopping. Also insanely durable, capable of taking so much beating before it self-destructed, destroying anything within but also everything around it as well. He had kept the other half of that protocol inactive, just in case the Aurors attacked it, but the potential was there.
Kamikaze drones were now possible, something that opened up so many possibilities, but all of that was for later, when he was out of Hogwarts.
That drone then took a fixed path, ofcourse being capable of navigating around small objects, and reaching a mountain near the Lair, where a small tunnel was dug to the Lair.
The drone will drop the newspaper into the tunnel, which had so many defensive enhancements that by the time the newspaper reached the Lair, they were completely sanitised, as if nothing had ever touched it. Then, they were delivered to Sirius' cell, because that's what it was.
A vastly more comfortable prison cell, but a prison nonetheless.
The problem with such an arrangement was that he could not control it, not from here anyway. The Global satellite network was not connected to the drone, just in case it was compromised, and the second a foreign magical interference was detected, its first priority was to delete the destination coordinates and the material inside it.
Was it overkill? Yes, especially since the language of that enchantment was fairly alien to the world, but when it came to magic? Anything could happen so he felt the measures justified.
Now, he had to deal with a Sirius who must have gone half mad as his mind must have jumped to the worst conclusion possible. Harry, being critically injured, would snap whatever sanity was left in the poor man.
He could guess that the only reason the man hadn't ended his life was because of the small hope of ever seeing Harry and maybe Harry forgiving him as well.
Sigh. What a shit show.
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