FicWad

Disclaimer: I own nothing...well except for what I actually own, but I own nothing to do with the Harry Potter books.
A/N: I’ve had a few people proclaim their love for Grammy and lucky for them it appears she’ll be playing a big part in the next chapter as well, I do thoroughly enjoy writing her so I’m almost as pleased. Happy reading 
Chapter Five
After an enjoyable dinner in which Harry had been re-acquainted with Seamus’ mother and introduced to his father Harry, exhausted from his escape to Ireland from Surrey headed up to bed early.
‘You two aren’t to stay up late gossiping about make-up and the boys you think are hot like you usually do are you? I’ve noticed Dean in particular is starting to develop some rather lovely breasts, must be all the girly art and pictures of the oh-so-pretty footballers plastered on your walls in the dorms.’ Harry threw back over his shoulder as he headed into his room.
The black boy just gave him the finger as Harry walked up the stairs.

He heard chuckling and whipped his head around to see Grammy standing at the top of the stairs ‘If I were ninety years younger and unmarried, you my young fellow would be in a lot of trouble.’
‘If I were thirty years older lovely lady, I would be attempting to seduce you right now’ was his reply.
‘I would hope you would be better at it than this’
He gave her a smouldering look.
‘You couldn’t keep up, young men these days, no stamina’
‘You forget though that I am the amazing boy-who-lived, and have all sorts of incredible powers.’
She let out another chuckle looping her arm though his, and he walked with her along the surprisingly long corridor to the doorway at the very end.
‘Madam, are you trying to seduce me? I must know if I am to put up a token resistance’
She just leered slightly in reply as he opened the door and gallantly bowed her into the room.

The room was a tastefully decorated sitting room with a few doors leading off it, one presumably to her bedroom proper, and Harry caught sight of what looked like a small greenhouse through an open door.
‘Come sit. I promise not to ravish you’ she said as she arranged her robes about her before sitting in one of the elegant chairs.
‘I’m afraid I cannot promise the same thing’ he replied with his increasingly common roguish grin.
She flashed one last smile at him before her expression turned serious.

‘I presume you used the Revelation Potion or some variant of it. I need to know what exactly was cast on you before I can decide how to remove the spells affecting you, and what order to remove them in’
Harry directed a sharp look at the old woman as he considered whether or not he could trust her, at the back of his mind upset with Dumbledore for destroying most of his faith in his fellow wizards. As if on cue a scratching was heard at the door and Harry got up to open it, letting Monster and Hedwig into the room.

‘What do you think?’ he asked the two who directed their gazes at the elderly woman.
He knew she absolutely loathed Dumbledore with far more intensity than she liked him, and would doubtless have few qualms about using the information to destroy the long time object of her hatred, something he could ill afford now. With the start of what promised to be a long and bloody war against Voldemort, their already disorganised ranks could ill afford more dissention or the potential loss of such a powerful ally. That and Harry planned to blackmail the hell out of him.

Under the prolonged, unblinking gazes of the three she barely stopped herself from shifting uncomfortably, something Harry found highly amusing.
‘I want a wizard’s oath stating that you will not reveal anything pertaining to me to any party either physically or magically without my explicit, un-coerced permission. Oh and you will also never disclose any information about me by name or by implication without ensuring there is no chance you could be overheard.’
The need for such an oath seemed to interest her greatly and she visibly hesitated running the exact wording over in her head to look for loopholes, but after a few moments she scowled slightly, apparently having found none.
She opened her mouth to perhaps try to change the wording of the oath or avoid it completely, but the amused look on Harry’s face and raised eyebrow put paid to that idea.

‘Not just a pretty face aren’t you? I am impressed with my grandson. Perchance a larger birthday present is due this year. Now, tell old Grammy how she can help you’
The smile on his face grew ‘I have an itch and.....’
She interrupted with a chuckle, ‘I see you’re not to be dissuaded’
‘How could I be? We are in this room all alone together and I’m sure you know an excellent silencing charm.’
‘Go get the parchment and bring it back here. I’ll be waiting.’
‘Naked?’ he asked with a hopeful look on his face
‘Smoking’ she said as she lit up her pipe with the tip of her wand
‘Tease’

After a few minutes searching through his trunk he unearthed the carefully concealed parchment and returned to find the old lady studiously ignoring the unblinking gazes of Hedwig and Monster, puffs of cloud shaped like roses and carrying the flower’s sweet scent drifting around her.
‘I’m sure you’re feeling most loved at the moment’ he said gesturing at the two animals
She removed the pipe from her mouth.
‘One of the reasons I considered helping you was the behaviour of your familiars’
He glanced from the old woman to the two animals.
‘Yes, and they are clearly brimming with love and good cheer towards you at the moment’
She snorted in an un-ladylike manner
‘I don’t think they dislike me, I know they don’t trust me. I met a very powerful wizard once when I was young, whose familiar was a common house cat and it did not display half the intelligence or loyalty as these two do.’
Hedwig hooted in a certain pattern, that if he remembered the code it correctly was something extremely rude. He was impressed at the creative and varied use of the swear words he had thought her, something that must have shown on his face.
Grammy looked mildly impressed ‘you understood what she just said didn’t you?’
‘Well there was an incident a few days ago where I might have thought her a few swear words, and we might have worked out a system of hoots and inflections for each one’ he replied slightly sheepishly.
‘I don’t know how much Seamus told you about me, but I can tell you now that I am long retired, that for fifty years I worked in the Irish ministry as what in Britain you call an unspeakable, a ridiculous name really.
In my early years I studied familiars and the bond they have with wizards, and though there is still much debate around that topic, one thing was universally acknowledged as true; the level of power and intelligence a familiar displays is directly correlated to the power and intelligence of the wizard they are bonded to.
No normal krup can win in a one-on-one physical fight with a cerebus, and no normal owl can curse, in what appears a spectacular manner from the length of that hooting.’

Harry looked at his familiars who had puffed up in pride and murmured softly ‘then you have an idea of the level of the games we are caught up in.’
She just winked at him and gestured towards the scroll with a languid wave of her hand.
‘The oath first please’
She looked slightly rueful as she flicked her wrist and the tip of her wand lit up.
‘I will not reveal anything pertaining to Harry James Potter to any party either physically or magically without his explicit, un-coerced permission. Furthermore I will never disclose any information about Harry James Potter by name or by implication without ensuring there is no chance I could be overheard. I so swear on pain of death.’
As she progressed through the oath the light from the tip of her wand curved up and touched her heart, mouth, hands and forehead then shooting out to join to the tip of Harry’s wand.
‘So mote it be’
‘So mote it be’ she replied sealing the oath and ending the light show.

She swiftly and gracefully began twitching and swishing her wand, streams of varied hued light leapt out and struck the walls of the room, spreading and coating it in layers of what were probably obscuring and concealing wards. After a few long minutes of rapid casting, she returned her wand to what was probably a holster hidden in the sleeve of her robe and he silently handed over the scroll of parchment into her waiting hand. He sat back to comfortably watch her now expressionless face as she very slowly read through it, silently puffing on her pipe.
It was obvious to the amused wizard when she got to the part about the spells on his wand as she actually dropped her pipe in her shock and didn’t notice Monster carefully creep forward to retrieve it, nor did she notice Harry carefully rescuing it.
Now holding the parchment with both slightly trembling hands an expression of outrage which got grimmer a she continued to read, was clear on her face.
She finished reading the scroll and spent a few minutes clearly repressing what promised to be a spectacular reaction.

Finally she turned to him with the most severe and forbidding look he had ever seen anyone wear, McGonegal would have wept in envy had she seen it.
‘Ever since the episode with dear Fionn Conaghan and the Finegas Academy I have thoroughly disliked that man, but never did I believe he was capable of such cruelty and disregard for his fellow wizard. He has shamed himself and all that ally themselves with him.’
Both Monster and Hedwig seemed to agree with her though their method of showing it was quite different.
Monster jumped into her lap and let the trembling witch pet him mechanically as she battled with her disbelief and horror. Hedwig let forth a hooting stream of expletives that would have made the hardiest sailor blush. He was again incredibly impressed with her imagination and spent a few quiet moments explaining to her why most of those actions were anatomically impossible for a human. The vindictive and predatory expression present in her unusually expressive eyes along with her claws almost snapping the top of the chair she was perched on, plainly stated that she had every intention of forcing Dumbledore to at least attempt them.

He turned from his failed attempts to soothe his clearly maliciously vengeful owl to meet the amused eyes of Grammy.
‘Should you ever desire to let your familiars deal with Albus, I, along with a good number of people, will pay you significant amounts of money for the pensieve memory, or failing that, the pictures.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like any other pictures?’ he asked with a smouldering look, effectively breaking the tension. ‘I can tell you on good authority that I look absolutely devastating with my quidditch robes on, and can promise you I look ever better with them off.’
‘That look is a formidable weapon young man, I hope you use it well.’
‘Oh I will, I promise’ he replied with a cheeky grin.

‘Now what steps have you taken?’
‘I took a purging potion, not the most pleasant experience, which should have wiped out all the potions affecting me. I brewed a blocking potion which I take every sick hours negating all the spells but the blood ones and I know a few ways that can get rid of them. I have no idea what to do about the tampering with my wand though.’
When he mentioned the spells on his wand her expression darkened again and the tension arose once more.
‘That man....’ she ground out from between clenched teeth
‘I do apologise, but I do not know if you are aware of what an extraordinary violation tampering with someone’s wand is’ she said as her fingers twitched convulsively around her wand.
‘Oh I have an idea’ he replied grimly as Hedwig snapped her beak violently and Monster let out a low menacing growl.
This seemed to snap her out of her dark thoughts and returned the expression of mild humour she generally wore to her face.
‘Yes, a good deal of money for those memories’ she said gazing at Hedwig’s sharp and powerful claws.

‘Now show me what you were planning to do to remove both the blood based spells and the ordinary spells’ she said, to which he handed over another smaller role of parchment.
‘These are all very feasible,’ she said thoughtfully after reading through the scroll, ‘but I may have a better idea. How do you feel about rituals? Not one of those ridiculous dark rituals involving unreasonable numbers of virgins, but one of the so-called light rituals?’
‘I had no idea there were light rituals.’
‘I’m not all that surprised. They’re not something you learn about in school, they’re information passed through the family. All families have their own grimoires and individual spells, but there are some generic and relatively well known, to the right people, helpful healing rituals.’
‘And you are one of the right people?’
‘Looks and brains, as I’ve said you’ll go far. Now as you may or may not know, many of the most important buildings in the wizarding world are situated where they are for specific reasons. Rituals were far more common in ages past, before wands developed such prominence, and rituals are composed of a number of incredibly specific elements, essential for any degree of success.
Buildings such as Hogwarts, the Finegas Academy and the various other schools and ministries were built in those locations for reason such as the potency of lay lines, which is the most significant factor in the case of Hogwarts, and their position in relation to the stars and certain patterns correlating with the elements in the case of the Finegas Academy.
I am good friends with Professor Conaghan who retains his position at the academy, mostly in the position of librarian nowadays. I’m sure he will let us use one of the various ritual rooms and areas of the Academy. Normally every ritual site in the Academy is full on midsummer’s day due to the increased potency of certain rituals on that day, ours in particular, but I’m confident he will find a discreet area for us to perform the ritual somewhere in the Academy.’

‘What will the ritual do and what will we need? Midsummer’s day is very soon and I have no intention of failing in a ritual, light or not. I’ve seen ol’ snake face himself, he’s a walking warning against miscast rituals.’
‘Really? Snake face? I wonder what ritual caused that..’ she began, but Harry swiftly cut off that train of thought with a gesture at Monster who farted noisily, he had spent long enough around Hermione to recognise the beginnings of weeks of intensive and obsessive research.
They spent the next few hours considering the exact wording of the letter to Professor Conaghan and in the discussion of the ritual itself before Harry, utterly exhausted, headed off to bed, throwing one last invitation to join him and a saucy wink over his shoulder at the older witch.
Her reply had him choking with laughter as he stumbled back to his room, his ever faithful familiars peering suspiciously at every shadow along the way.



Harry lay in bed a few days later, having had the most delicious sleep-in. A lazy grin slid across his face as he remembered his first morning in Ireland, and he yawned and stretched like a cat. Having been already tired from his travels to Ireland, he had been further exhausted by the long and intense conversation he had had with Grammy. He had been woken from his much deserved rest by Seamus and Dean, who had decided that he had slept for too long and were getting bored, therefore they determined to wake him up in a rather abrupt manner. What they seemed to have forgotten was that he had two rather vicious over-protective familiars who do not appreciate being violently woken up. Harry was let out a lazy chuckle as he remembered the sight, Monster in particular had not been impressed and Harry caught him shooting speculative looks at the two young wizards ever since that morning. Looks they had yet to notice. Hedwig on the other hand had seemed satisfied with herself having drawn significant amounts of blood and seemed to have deemed her wrath had been suitably noticed.

He sighed again as he stretched his slightly sore body, the ritual felt almost like that new-age nonsense Petunia used to mutter about what with the burning twigs and the dancing naked. He supposed the blood catered to his snobbish magical tastes, it made the ritual feel less theatrical and far more authentic and crucially, more likely to succeed.
While all but a few of the ingredients were relatively common, the ritual itself seemed to him to be very complex as it required exacting precision of both timing, movements and wording for an extended period of time. When he had asked about the complexity, Grammy as she now insisted Dean and Harry call her, scoffed at him and proclaimed it of moderate difficulty. Harry wondered what would happen if he got any of it wrong, the most critical ingredients were various different woods so he supposed he would sprout leaves or develop bark instead of skin permanently. That was sure to ruin his prospective love-life, well hopefully anyway, Seamus had said Neville was over his odd love of herbology. Harry remembered that odd plant Neville had on the train, the mible-something, honestly having a plant that crooned and spat out goo who you stoked it was a little suspect, it even looked vaguely phallic.

Harry had spent almost every hour over the last few days learning the phonetics of the ritual chant, and the dance that accompanied it. That was after he had gotten Grammy to write down the exact wording of the chant and he had spent long hours making sure he understood every word he was chanting and had thought about every word and their use carefully. It’s not that he didn’t trust Grammy, it’s just that he didn’t trust the benchmark to which the wizarding world measured anything acceptable. Having a literal twig and acorns instead of the favourite parts of his anatomy might be deemed a fair trade-off to the advantages of the ritual and Grammy hadn’t mentioned it as she thought it inconsequential, but damn it he was not inconsequential in any respect and Dumbledore was not worth the family jewels.

After the intensive study, at which she caught him and nodded in an approving manner, not annoyed in the least that he didn’t trust her, Harry began trying to learn the ritual chant and dance. He would have tried to figure out all the various nuances of the dance and what each precise movement meant but not having months to spend to understand even the basics of a ritual he contented himself with researching the ritual to the highest level of detail available, which was considerable as through Grammy he compete access to the Finegas Academy’s vast library which apparently dwarfed Hogwarts library in quite a few different respects.
While he may not have known the Hogwarts library down to the book as Hermione was valiantly attempting to, he knew the various sections quite well having been dragged there for ‘research’ quite a few times and the restricted section even better having used it a few times hiding out from patrolling prefects at night. He did know that there was no ‘rituals’ section in the library proper, although there was a slight chance it was a small sub-section and the restricted section did contain a book on rituals, most noticeably the one that screamed way back in first year when he had opened it, but they all appeared to be dark rituals.
In fact, just travelling to Ireland and hanging out with Seamus and his family was letting Harry catch a glimpse of just how truly ignorant he was of the wizarding world. While yes he had known there were other subjects beside those thought in Hogwarts, there had always been an unnoticeable implication they were, if not dark magics, then not light magics. Therefore they were something the boy-who-lived should not touch with a ten foot pole, repeated accusations of being a dark wizard over the years by both his peers and the public had left their mark.
He highly doubted the reasons for this were nothing more than pure snobbery on behalf of English wizards as a whole, not some evil Dumbledore-trying-to-keep-the-population-ignorant-and-powerless scheme had for but a millisecond drifted through his mind. He had noticed the slightly xenophobic attitudes of his school-mates, his attention to the attitudes of those around him, fine-tuned from the playground where Dudley was king, had never left him. While he had noticed and mentally registered this attitude, his over-whelming desire, from as far back as he could remember, to be the opposite to the Dursleys who were racist and bigoted to the highest degree, had not let him slip into this mind-set as he had with many of the other prejudices of his peers.

Seamus and Dean had sat by him as he practised dance part of the ritual, occasionally throwing spells at him ‘to make sure he could perform the ritual under pressure’ and constantly mocking him until he had brought Hedwig out one day to watch. The pair had eyed her sharp claws and decided that there was Gryffindor and then there was stupid. A Gryffindor always knew when it was best to refrain from engaging in battle if severely outclassed, and when something has talons over an inch long and has shown a predisposition to use them, it was clear the two had judged it one of those situations.
Monster had seemed to droop slightly when the two had slunk off, he seemed to have developed some respect for Hedwig’s maiming abilities and had looked very eager and alert during the Hedwig-wizard stare-down.

The ritual had many components and involved huge amounts of concentration on his part, even for the seasoned participant in rituals it was nothing to scoff at. He had to dance using certain steps and quite complex hand gestures in an overall inward spiral pattern. The timing was crucial as each syllable of the chant corresponded to a movement of his body and to various other inter-woven parts of the ritual, such as the burning of certain woods and the chimes of a bell.

Monster chose this moment to interrupt his sleep-in by jumping on his bladder, his favourite method of waking Harry, as he seemed to love watching the young wizard running to the bathroom cursing his furry face the whole way.