![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A Gracey's Chance Chapter 3
Title - A Gracey's Chance Chapter 3
Rating - PG
Summary - Twelve years after Voldermort's defeat, Harry receives a letter from an old friend, with a most unusual request.
Disclaimer - I only wish I owned Harry Potter. If I owned Haunted Mansion, the story would have been told in a much better way.
Following Marcy's directions, Harry drove their rented car over the bridge that crossed the massive body of water that was Lake Pontchartrain while Hermione chatted away about what she knew about the area. Though it had been several years since Hurricane Katrina, its devastating effects could still be seen., and Harry wondered how many new ghosts the area had acquired because of it. He also wondered if Pontchartrain Jane was still hanging around or if the hurricane had scared her off.
A mile north of Lake Pontchartrain's northern shore, and two miles west of the town of Mandville, sat Gracey Manor, surrounded by swamps and forests. Harry and Hermione were surprised at the relatively good condition of the mansion upon pulling up into the drive. Lack of maintenance coupled with the Louisiana climate should have reduced the house to rubble within a century, yet it still stood, though it was beginning to show the wear of its years. The gates were open on rusted hinges creaking in the muggy breeze. The pair spared a glance at each other because, even though they were still some distance from the house, they could feel the thrumming of the powerful wards that kept Gracey imprisoned. Though Hermione wasn't yet feeling Gracey's presence, Harry could, and to him the misery and anguish seemed to be almost a palpable presence in the air.
Feeling a little less hesitant about assisting the trapped soul within, he drove the car up in front of the front doors and parked.
"Shall we?" Hermione asked with a slight tremble in her voice, and it was obvious then that she too could feel Gracey's presence.
The two got out of the car and walked through the front doors into the house. The interior was dark and gloomy with very little light getting in through the dirt streaked windows.
"Lumos." Hermione said softly, and she held her wand aloft as the two of them began to search for the ballroom. It took them nearly an hour to find it, but when they did, they knew right away that they had come to the right place. A doorway, with dozens of runes etched into the molding around the door frame gave it away. They spent a moment looking them over to make sure it was safe to enter.
"Whoever did this certainly was thorough.” Harry commented “They did not want him to get out at all. If he even attempted -”
“Shhh,” Hermione said softly “I hear something.” Harry fell silent for a moment, and then he heard it too through the heavy wooden double doors - a soft sobbing. The Potters looked at each other, and then Hermione reached out and opened the door. To their surprise, it opened easily on silent hinges, and a gust of stale air rolled out to greet them.
The ballroom was cloaked in shadows, and Hermione canceled her light spell to allow their eyes to adjust. The door closed quietly behind them, and the crying stopped for a moment, while Harry felt a pair of supernatural eyes on them. The gaze did not feel friendly, but it wasn't hostile either, and it was touched with a bit of what felt like.. longing?
He took a look around the room, something borne out of habit during the second war with Voldermort, and all he could see was a large room with many curtained windows and elegant chandliers hanging from the ceiling. A pipe organ sat on a dais at the far end of the room, but that was as far as the decorations went.
Hermione raised her want to relight it, but Harry placed his hand on her wrist to stop her. He didn't need any light to see, and he didn't think that Gracey would welcome it. He began to walk across the floor to the other side of the room, where he sensed Gracey's presence to be.
"Mr. Gracey?" he called out softly, and the sobbing from the opposite side of the room, which had restarted, paused again "My name is Harry Potter, and my wife and I are here to see if we can help you. Will you let us?" Spirits, especially those that were wrapped in misery and sorrow, weren't always the most logical, and there was the very real chance that he would refuse.
"Please leave." The words were softly spoken, and they sent a chill racing up Harry's spine. He heard a London accent, and he wondered how the American born Gracey had acquired it. He had no time to ponder it though, as they reached the far wall, and for the first time they laid eyes on Edward Gracey.
He was sitting with his back to them, hugging his knees and rocking gently back and forth, as if he was trying to bring himself a small measure of comfort. His clothes were of a style and cut popular towards the end of the 19th century, but they were ragged, faded, and frayed along the edges. Since they were only a manifestation of his will and not actual clothing, Harry knew that Gracey had to be suffering a great deal to allow himself to appear in such a way.
"Mr. Gracey?" Hermione said gently "We only want to help."
"I am beyond help, Mrs. Potter."
Being either incredibly brave or incredibly foolish, Harry wasn't sure which, Hermione knelt down beside him and tried to look him in the face, but he turned away. "You don't know that yet. You don't know what we can do yet, so how can you say that you're beyond help?"
"Even Heaven has rejected me. There is no help for me."
"Then whoever is in charge up there is an idiot. You were hurt and in terrible pain, and you did what you did out of desperation.” He shook his head in denial, and Hermione reached out and grasped his wrists in her hands. He could have easily moved away from her; Harry had spotted no runes to prevent him from moving around within the room itself, but he made no attempt to. Instead he slowly raised his head and looked at her, and Harry was slightly amused to see that he looked more than a little surprised at her boldness. He looked at her for a brief moment before he turned away.
"Please leave me in peace." he said softly, and he pulled his hands away and turned back to face the wall.
"I would hardly call such an existence peace." Harry said as he approached. Gracey shuddered and seemed to curl in on himself, like he was trying to hide from the terrible truth.
"You feel similar to the ones that imprisoned me here." he said.
"I have... similar abilities. I don't know if I can release you from here, but I'm sure that I can do something to help."
"I have tried... so many times to escape from here, but every time I am repelled away from of the walls, and I feel pain, true pain, which I have not felt in so long. But it does not matter, there is nothing for me outside of this room. Elizabeth is gone, and without her, any existence is worthless. I would rather face oblivion than go on without her."
"I could oblige you there," Harry replied "and destroy you utterly, thus giving you the oblivion that you want, but I won't." Despite their reputation, Necromancers did have a code of ethics, even if not all of them followed it. "Instead, I will make you a deal. Let me get you out of this room, at the very least, and then you can go on your way, and Hermione and I will leave you be. Do you accept?"
Gracey stilled his rocking for a moment, and he seemed to be considering the offer, but then he suddenly vanished. Harry caught a brief glimpse of a grey blue blur moving across the room towards the nearest window, and then he heard a loud humming, saw a bright white flash, and Gracey flew back across the room to land painfully on the floor in a heap.
"Mr. Gracey!" Hermione cried, and she ran over to him. Harry followed at a slower pace and noted that his encounter with the wards had made him less corporeal. The blue grey mist that he seemed to be mostly composed off was visible along the edges of his clothing, and around his head, hands, and feet. The wards were evidently designed to damage, if not, destroy, him whenever he tried to escape. The man seemed to be stunned and dazed, so Harry took the chance to pull a piece of white chalk from the bag that he was carrying. The bag contained what he referred to as his kit, and it contained all of the various items he needed for his craft.
While Gracey was distracted, he used the chalk to draw four lines in a box formation around him, and then quickly inscribed runes at the corners. He then used his wand to power the runes, using the ambient magic in the area. The runes glowed extremely bright for a brief moment, and then they faded to a steady glow. The boundary wasn't overly powerful - if Gracey really tried, he could get through them - but it would contain him long enough for Harry to figure out how to get him out. He didn't want the man destroying himself on the wards or getting angry and attacking one of them while he worked. Hermione was inside the barrier with him, but she could leave it if need be.
With Gracey safely contained, he went about the large room, analyzing the runes etched into the woodwork. Containing a spirit, especially an angry one, is a nasty business, and Harry figured that two had used temporary containments shields to keep Gracey confined while a third, and possibly a fourth, had carved and powered the runes on the walls and door and window frames. However they had done it, one thing was clear; they had never intended for Gracey to leave. The wards were constructed in such a way that pulling one down would initiate a catastrophic cascade failure that would destroy anyone and anything inside when they came down.
Behind him, he could hear Hermione speaking softly to Gracey, and he wondered how he was going to make good on his promise to get the man out. He couldn't go through the wards, and they couldn't be pulled down, so he had to find another way. He closed his eyes and thought, and Marcy's words came back to him.
You never know; he just might be the answer to your child problem.
And then he had the answer.
"Mr. Gracey?" he asked "Where is your family's cemetery?"
Gracey, who was huddled in a ball on the floor next to Hermione, raised one shaking arm and pointed north, behind the house. He said nothing.
"Stay with him, Mione, I'm going to check into something."
Hermione looked up from where she had been speaking softly to the distraught man next to her and nodded. Harry then walked out of the room. Rather than wander the maze of corridors to find the back door, he simply went out the front and walked around the building. Nature was slowly taking over the place, and within a few decades, the house would likely be a pile of rubble, sinking into a swamp. Marcy had shown him a few paintings of the house during its glory days under Edward's father, George Gracey, and it killed him to think of such a beautiful structure being slowly destroyed over time. The house seemed to reflect its master’s mental and emotional state. Once Gracey was taken care of, he could get Bill Weasley to come out and help him set some wards of their own: stasis wards to halt the deterioration of the house, creature repulsion wards to keep the denizens of the swamp away, and weather wards so it would survive the next Katrina. A Fidelus to keep people away wouldn’t hurt either. That way, once Edward was all grown up, he would have a home waiting for him if he wanted it.
He found the cemetery in short order, and he spent several moments before he found George Gracey’s marker. Next to him lay his wife and Edward’s mother, Abigail. Only a few feet away from his mother’s grave, was Edward’s. Harry used severing charms on the grass and weeds nearby before he opened his kit and took out a miniaturized cauldron and a stand, returned them to full size, and set them up on Edward Gracey’s grave.
During his time under Marcy’s tutelage, he had asked about the ritual that Voldermort had used to return himself to a body at the end of the Triwizard Tournament, and he had learned that the ritual was a corrupted form of an earlier one that was used to return a spirit to a body to give it another chance at life. The body created was a clone of their original one and used material - hair, blood, bone, etc - to essentially create a clone which would then be given life, and the soul would be drawn into it. The ritual had drawbacks; it was draining on the caster, and the caster and the soul in question had to really want it to work for it to succeed, but Harry was confident that Gracey would go along with it.
Basically, he would be creating a soulless homunculus, using his own blood and flesh as the base. At the critical time, he would add something from Gracey’s original body, which would give it the DNA needed to create a artificially made identical twin. Pulling out his silver knife, Harry braced himself and deeply slashed the palms of his hands and let the blood run freely into the cauldron. As he did so, he began to chant, and a few minutes later, he braced himself a second time and cleanly sliced off a patch of skin from his forearm and let it drop into the blood below. He lit a small fire below the cauldron and began to chant again. He only hoped that there was enough of Gracey left in that grave to work. Several minutes later, he pointed his wand at the ground in front of Gracey’s headstone and cast a summoning spell. A small stream of bone fragments erupted from the ground and flew into the cauldron, where they mingled with the frothing mixture of blood and skin already in there. Taking a hold of his silver stirring rod, he began stirring the mass bubbling in the cauldron and began to chant a third time.
An hour later, he reached into the cauldron and carefully lifted out the small form within. In his arms he held a perfectly formed baby, which appeared to be that of an eighteen month old. It was inert, still, with no life or soul. The hair was a dark blond and the eyes were a deep blue in contrast with the adult Gracey’s brown hair and eyes, but Harry was certain that the hair and eyes would continue to darken with time. Carefully wrapping it in a conjured blanket, he walked back towards the house.
Neither Gracey nor Hermione had moved when he walked back into the ballroom, but Hermione looked up at him when he walked in. Gracey did not move. He walked over to the containment spell and stepped in.
“You cannot let me out.” Gracey said softly, and it wasn’t a question.
“No,” Harry replied “I cannot, but I still can get you out of here.”
“How? I cannot move beyond this room.”
“Not in spirit form, no, you cannot.”
Gracey sat up and looked at him then, and he noticed the body that Harry was holding in his arms.
“And what would that be?”
“I cannot take the wards down to release you that way. I can, however, give you a new body, and take you out of the room.”
Gracey didn’t seem to have trouble accepting that Harry had such power, it was the fact that Harry was willing to do so that he seemed unable to grasp.
“Why would you do such a thing for me?”
Harry smiled gently at him. “You’re being punished for something that you shouldn’t be. Like Hermione said, you were hurt and in terrible pain, and you only wanted to be with the one you loved. You shouldn’t be punished for that. I am offering a way out of the house and out of your pain. If you let me complete the ritual, your soul will go into this -” He held up the small form in his arms. “-and you will live a new life as my and Hermione’s son. If you want, we can even preserve the house, so you can come back to it later.”
“Your son?”
“Of course,” Hermione said “We’re just not going to leave you here alone. We’ll take you home, and love you like our own. We’ll adopt you, and you’ll be ours.”
“But where, where did you get that?” Gracey pointed to the homunculus.
“I created this.” Harry answered “It is a copy, I guess you could say, of your original body. It looks like you did at this age, and it will continue that as it grows.”
“Is it.. alive?”
“Not yet. When I complete the ritual, it will gain life then.”
“Why would you do this?” Gracey asked again, and Harry thought that he almost sounded desperate, desperate and hopeful.
“Because we want to help you. We don’t want you to be miserable anymore.”
“Will I remember anything?”
“Not initially. Later, you may remember fragments of your previous life, but I doubt it will be much.”
“Are you certain that you want to do this? Are you certain that you want me?”
“We are sure.” Hermione whispered as she smiled at him. He looked at her, and then he looked at Harry, and Harry was certain that he saw tears in Gracey’s eyes.
“When can we do this? Can we do it now? I want to leave. Please, take me out of this place.”
Harry nodded and handed off the doll to his wife. He stepped out of the containment spell, and taking his chalk, began to draw more runes on the floor, arrayed in circles. The larger of two circles would contain the doll, the smallest circle was where Gracey himself would stand, and the middle sized circle was where Harry himself would stand while he completed the ritual. He then linked the circles together with more runes, arranged in lines, which would allow the flow of power to move unhindered. Once he was certain that everything was right, he took the homunculus back from Hermione and placed it in the largest circle. Once that was done, he deactivated the containment runes and wiped the chalk away in one line.
“Come,” he beckoned Gracey, who hesitantly stepped where he was directed to “You must truly want this to work, Edward, or it will fail. Is this truly what you want?”
Gracey nodded, and Harry could definitely see tears then. “Yes.”
“Then stay within the circle, and do not move until the spell begins to pull on you. You will know what to do then.” Gracey nodded, and Harry looked over at Hermione, letting her now with a look to stay back and not interfere.
Then, for the fourth time that day, he began to chant.
Chapter 2 -- Chapter 4
Back to the Archive
Rating - PG
Summary - Twelve years after Voldermort's defeat, Harry receives a letter from an old friend, with a most unusual request.
Disclaimer - I only wish I owned Harry Potter. If I owned Haunted Mansion, the story would have been told in a much better way.
3.
Following Marcy's directions, Harry drove their rented car over the bridge that crossed the massive body of water that was Lake Pontchartrain while Hermione chatted away about what she knew about the area. Though it had been several years since Hurricane Katrina, its devastating effects could still be seen., and Harry wondered how many new ghosts the area had acquired because of it. He also wondered if Pontchartrain Jane was still hanging around or if the hurricane had scared her off.
A mile north of Lake Pontchartrain's northern shore, and two miles west of the town of Mandville, sat Gracey Manor, surrounded by swamps and forests. Harry and Hermione were surprised at the relatively good condition of the mansion upon pulling up into the drive. Lack of maintenance coupled with the Louisiana climate should have reduced the house to rubble within a century, yet it still stood, though it was beginning to show the wear of its years. The gates were open on rusted hinges creaking in the muggy breeze. The pair spared a glance at each other because, even though they were still some distance from the house, they could feel the thrumming of the powerful wards that kept Gracey imprisoned. Though Hermione wasn't yet feeling Gracey's presence, Harry could, and to him the misery and anguish seemed to be almost a palpable presence in the air.
Feeling a little less hesitant about assisting the trapped soul within, he drove the car up in front of the front doors and parked.
"Shall we?" Hermione asked with a slight tremble in her voice, and it was obvious then that she too could feel Gracey's presence.
The two got out of the car and walked through the front doors into the house. The interior was dark and gloomy with very little light getting in through the dirt streaked windows.
"Lumos." Hermione said softly, and she held her wand aloft as the two of them began to search for the ballroom. It took them nearly an hour to find it, but when they did, they knew right away that they had come to the right place. A doorway, with dozens of runes etched into the molding around the door frame gave it away. They spent a moment looking them over to make sure it was safe to enter.
"Whoever did this certainly was thorough.” Harry commented “They did not want him to get out at all. If he even attempted -”
“Shhh,” Hermione said softly “I hear something.” Harry fell silent for a moment, and then he heard it too through the heavy wooden double doors - a soft sobbing. The Potters looked at each other, and then Hermione reached out and opened the door. To their surprise, it opened easily on silent hinges, and a gust of stale air rolled out to greet them.
The ballroom was cloaked in shadows, and Hermione canceled her light spell to allow their eyes to adjust. The door closed quietly behind them, and the crying stopped for a moment, while Harry felt a pair of supernatural eyes on them. The gaze did not feel friendly, but it wasn't hostile either, and it was touched with a bit of what felt like.. longing?
He took a look around the room, something borne out of habit during the second war with Voldermort, and all he could see was a large room with many curtained windows and elegant chandliers hanging from the ceiling. A pipe organ sat on a dais at the far end of the room, but that was as far as the decorations went.
Hermione raised her want to relight it, but Harry placed his hand on her wrist to stop her. He didn't need any light to see, and he didn't think that Gracey would welcome it. He began to walk across the floor to the other side of the room, where he sensed Gracey's presence to be.
"Mr. Gracey?" he called out softly, and the sobbing from the opposite side of the room, which had restarted, paused again "My name is Harry Potter, and my wife and I are here to see if we can help you. Will you let us?" Spirits, especially those that were wrapped in misery and sorrow, weren't always the most logical, and there was the very real chance that he would refuse.
"Please leave." The words were softly spoken, and they sent a chill racing up Harry's spine. He heard a London accent, and he wondered how the American born Gracey had acquired it. He had no time to ponder it though, as they reached the far wall, and for the first time they laid eyes on Edward Gracey.
He was sitting with his back to them, hugging his knees and rocking gently back and forth, as if he was trying to bring himself a small measure of comfort. His clothes were of a style and cut popular towards the end of the 19th century, but they were ragged, faded, and frayed along the edges. Since they were only a manifestation of his will and not actual clothing, Harry knew that Gracey had to be suffering a great deal to allow himself to appear in such a way.
"Mr. Gracey?" Hermione said gently "We only want to help."
"I am beyond help, Mrs. Potter."
Being either incredibly brave or incredibly foolish, Harry wasn't sure which, Hermione knelt down beside him and tried to look him in the face, but he turned away. "You don't know that yet. You don't know what we can do yet, so how can you say that you're beyond help?"
"Even Heaven has rejected me. There is no help for me."
"Then whoever is in charge up there is an idiot. You were hurt and in terrible pain, and you did what you did out of desperation.” He shook his head in denial, and Hermione reached out and grasped his wrists in her hands. He could have easily moved away from her; Harry had spotted no runes to prevent him from moving around within the room itself, but he made no attempt to. Instead he slowly raised his head and looked at her, and Harry was slightly amused to see that he looked more than a little surprised at her boldness. He looked at her for a brief moment before he turned away.
"Please leave me in peace." he said softly, and he pulled his hands away and turned back to face the wall.
"I would hardly call such an existence peace." Harry said as he approached. Gracey shuddered and seemed to curl in on himself, like he was trying to hide from the terrible truth.
"You feel similar to the ones that imprisoned me here." he said.
"I have... similar abilities. I don't know if I can release you from here, but I'm sure that I can do something to help."
"I have tried... so many times to escape from here, but every time I am repelled away from of the walls, and I feel pain, true pain, which I have not felt in so long. But it does not matter, there is nothing for me outside of this room. Elizabeth is gone, and without her, any existence is worthless. I would rather face oblivion than go on without her."
"I could oblige you there," Harry replied "and destroy you utterly, thus giving you the oblivion that you want, but I won't." Despite their reputation, Necromancers did have a code of ethics, even if not all of them followed it. "Instead, I will make you a deal. Let me get you out of this room, at the very least, and then you can go on your way, and Hermione and I will leave you be. Do you accept?"
Gracey stilled his rocking for a moment, and he seemed to be considering the offer, but then he suddenly vanished. Harry caught a brief glimpse of a grey blue blur moving across the room towards the nearest window, and then he heard a loud humming, saw a bright white flash, and Gracey flew back across the room to land painfully on the floor in a heap.
"Mr. Gracey!" Hermione cried, and she ran over to him. Harry followed at a slower pace and noted that his encounter with the wards had made him less corporeal. The blue grey mist that he seemed to be mostly composed off was visible along the edges of his clothing, and around his head, hands, and feet. The wards were evidently designed to damage, if not, destroy, him whenever he tried to escape. The man seemed to be stunned and dazed, so Harry took the chance to pull a piece of white chalk from the bag that he was carrying. The bag contained what he referred to as his kit, and it contained all of the various items he needed for his craft.
While Gracey was distracted, he used the chalk to draw four lines in a box formation around him, and then quickly inscribed runes at the corners. He then used his wand to power the runes, using the ambient magic in the area. The runes glowed extremely bright for a brief moment, and then they faded to a steady glow. The boundary wasn't overly powerful - if Gracey really tried, he could get through them - but it would contain him long enough for Harry to figure out how to get him out. He didn't want the man destroying himself on the wards or getting angry and attacking one of them while he worked. Hermione was inside the barrier with him, but she could leave it if need be.
With Gracey safely contained, he went about the large room, analyzing the runes etched into the woodwork. Containing a spirit, especially an angry one, is a nasty business, and Harry figured that two had used temporary containments shields to keep Gracey confined while a third, and possibly a fourth, had carved and powered the runes on the walls and door and window frames. However they had done it, one thing was clear; they had never intended for Gracey to leave. The wards were constructed in such a way that pulling one down would initiate a catastrophic cascade failure that would destroy anyone and anything inside when they came down.
Behind him, he could hear Hermione speaking softly to Gracey, and he wondered how he was going to make good on his promise to get the man out. He couldn't go through the wards, and they couldn't be pulled down, so he had to find another way. He closed his eyes and thought, and Marcy's words came back to him.
You never know; he just might be the answer to your child problem.
And then he had the answer.
"Mr. Gracey?" he asked "Where is your family's cemetery?"
Gracey, who was huddled in a ball on the floor next to Hermione, raised one shaking arm and pointed north, behind the house. He said nothing.
"Stay with him, Mione, I'm going to check into something."
Hermione looked up from where she had been speaking softly to the distraught man next to her and nodded. Harry then walked out of the room. Rather than wander the maze of corridors to find the back door, he simply went out the front and walked around the building. Nature was slowly taking over the place, and within a few decades, the house would likely be a pile of rubble, sinking into a swamp. Marcy had shown him a few paintings of the house during its glory days under Edward's father, George Gracey, and it killed him to think of such a beautiful structure being slowly destroyed over time. The house seemed to reflect its master’s mental and emotional state. Once Gracey was taken care of, he could get Bill Weasley to come out and help him set some wards of their own: stasis wards to halt the deterioration of the house, creature repulsion wards to keep the denizens of the swamp away, and weather wards so it would survive the next Katrina. A Fidelus to keep people away wouldn’t hurt either. That way, once Edward was all grown up, he would have a home waiting for him if he wanted it.
He found the cemetery in short order, and he spent several moments before he found George Gracey’s marker. Next to him lay his wife and Edward’s mother, Abigail. Only a few feet away from his mother’s grave, was Edward’s. Harry used severing charms on the grass and weeds nearby before he opened his kit and took out a miniaturized cauldron and a stand, returned them to full size, and set them up on Edward Gracey’s grave.
During his time under Marcy’s tutelage, he had asked about the ritual that Voldermort had used to return himself to a body at the end of the Triwizard Tournament, and he had learned that the ritual was a corrupted form of an earlier one that was used to return a spirit to a body to give it another chance at life. The body created was a clone of their original one and used material - hair, blood, bone, etc - to essentially create a clone which would then be given life, and the soul would be drawn into it. The ritual had drawbacks; it was draining on the caster, and the caster and the soul in question had to really want it to work for it to succeed, but Harry was confident that Gracey would go along with it.
Basically, he would be creating a soulless homunculus, using his own blood and flesh as the base. At the critical time, he would add something from Gracey’s original body, which would give it the DNA needed to create a artificially made identical twin. Pulling out his silver knife, Harry braced himself and deeply slashed the palms of his hands and let the blood run freely into the cauldron. As he did so, he began to chant, and a few minutes later, he braced himself a second time and cleanly sliced off a patch of skin from his forearm and let it drop into the blood below. He lit a small fire below the cauldron and began to chant again. He only hoped that there was enough of Gracey left in that grave to work. Several minutes later, he pointed his wand at the ground in front of Gracey’s headstone and cast a summoning spell. A small stream of bone fragments erupted from the ground and flew into the cauldron, where they mingled with the frothing mixture of blood and skin already in there. Taking a hold of his silver stirring rod, he began stirring the mass bubbling in the cauldron and began to chant a third time.
An hour later, he reached into the cauldron and carefully lifted out the small form within. In his arms he held a perfectly formed baby, which appeared to be that of an eighteen month old. It was inert, still, with no life or soul. The hair was a dark blond and the eyes were a deep blue in contrast with the adult Gracey’s brown hair and eyes, but Harry was certain that the hair and eyes would continue to darken with time. Carefully wrapping it in a conjured blanket, he walked back towards the house.
Neither Gracey nor Hermione had moved when he walked back into the ballroom, but Hermione looked up at him when he walked in. Gracey did not move. He walked over to the containment spell and stepped in.
“You cannot let me out.” Gracey said softly, and it wasn’t a question.
“No,” Harry replied “I cannot, but I still can get you out of here.”
“How? I cannot move beyond this room.”
“Not in spirit form, no, you cannot.”
Gracey sat up and looked at him then, and he noticed the body that Harry was holding in his arms.
“And what would that be?”
“I cannot take the wards down to release you that way. I can, however, give you a new body, and take you out of the room.”
Gracey didn’t seem to have trouble accepting that Harry had such power, it was the fact that Harry was willing to do so that he seemed unable to grasp.
“Why would you do such a thing for me?”
Harry smiled gently at him. “You’re being punished for something that you shouldn’t be. Like Hermione said, you were hurt and in terrible pain, and you only wanted to be with the one you loved. You shouldn’t be punished for that. I am offering a way out of the house and out of your pain. If you let me complete the ritual, your soul will go into this -” He held up the small form in his arms. “-and you will live a new life as my and Hermione’s son. If you want, we can even preserve the house, so you can come back to it later.”
“Your son?”
“Of course,” Hermione said “We’re just not going to leave you here alone. We’ll take you home, and love you like our own. We’ll adopt you, and you’ll be ours.”
“But where, where did you get that?” Gracey pointed to the homunculus.
“I created this.” Harry answered “It is a copy, I guess you could say, of your original body. It looks like you did at this age, and it will continue that as it grows.”
“Is it.. alive?”
“Not yet. When I complete the ritual, it will gain life then.”
“Why would you do this?” Gracey asked again, and Harry thought that he almost sounded desperate, desperate and hopeful.
“Because we want to help you. We don’t want you to be miserable anymore.”
“Will I remember anything?”
“Not initially. Later, you may remember fragments of your previous life, but I doubt it will be much.”
“Are you certain that you want to do this? Are you certain that you want me?”
“We are sure.” Hermione whispered as she smiled at him. He looked at her, and then he looked at Harry, and Harry was certain that he saw tears in Gracey’s eyes.
“When can we do this? Can we do it now? I want to leave. Please, take me out of this place.”
Harry nodded and handed off the doll to his wife. He stepped out of the containment spell, and taking his chalk, began to draw more runes on the floor, arrayed in circles. The larger of two circles would contain the doll, the smallest circle was where Gracey himself would stand, and the middle sized circle was where Harry himself would stand while he completed the ritual. He then linked the circles together with more runes, arranged in lines, which would allow the flow of power to move unhindered. Once he was certain that everything was right, he took the homunculus back from Hermione and placed it in the largest circle. Once that was done, he deactivated the containment runes and wiped the chalk away in one line.
“Come,” he beckoned Gracey, who hesitantly stepped where he was directed to “You must truly want this to work, Edward, or it will fail. Is this truly what you want?”
Gracey nodded, and Harry could definitely see tears then. “Yes.”
“Then stay within the circle, and do not move until the spell begins to pull on you. You will know what to do then.” Gracey nodded, and Harry looked over at Hermione, letting her now with a look to stay back and not interfere.
Then, for the fourth time that day, he began to chant.
Chapter 2 -- Chapter 4
Back to the Archive