Harry Potter : Chapter 32: A Crown for the King III

In this residence that I had found during my first attempt at apparating, roughly a year before, I had smuggled the two werewolves that I had decided to help.

I had explained their siuation once they'd woken up, and I was very lucky that Marie's grandmother was english, and that she had learned enough to talk and act as a translator for Paul.

...

As I walked towards the house I had spent copious amounts of reparo charms to turn into something comfortable, following the large, flat fluvial stones that acted as a path, the door opened, Marie walking out with a frown that she didn't seem capable of abandoning on her features.

She had hairs of a dark brown that mathced her eyes, a slightly upturned, botton nose, and callused hands that showed she was used to work. She might have been 1,60 meters tall, but next to me she seemed almost a child playing pretend.

"There are holes in my roof." she flatly greeted me, her voice too tired to signal anything beyond the need for me to fix her home.

"I'll renew the spells necessary." I nodded seriously at the minute and yet imposing woman, her dark fringe momentarily hiding her furrowed brow from sight, "Where is Paul?"

"You shouldn't have given him the bicycle, he spends too much time at the village." Marie chastised me, making me frown.

"He's a drunk?"

Her expression hardened, if because I hurted her delicate sensibilities, or because she didn't want to think about it, I didn't know. In any case she looked away, refusing to answer.

A wholly different concern blossomed in my mind then: "Marie, does he hurt you?"

"No!" she shook her head in revulsion.

"Just..."

"If he reveals the truth, you'll be on the street faster than you can blink, and I won't be able to help you then."

I tilted my head as I sat on the stone bench at my left, my eyes roaming briefly over the courtyard.

"He's a frenchman that lost everything because of the war, his drunk ramblings about werewolves wouldn't catch unduly attention."

"I understand that..." the woman spoke softly, her narrowed eyes revealing the deeper than normal lines that she had on her face.

"What we have here is much more than I could have hoped for, food, water, a roof, freedom... the germans don't waste their bombs on open portions of the land... thank you... I..."

I stopped the rambling woman by landing a hand gently on her shoulder.

"I'm looking into a cure, it will take a lot of time, but it is something that wizardkind had struggled against for millennia, it will take me years in the best case scenario."

I didn't know anything of Belby's timeline regarding the discovery of the Wolfsbane potion, I inly knew that in canon Remus Lupin hadn't been able to make use of it as a child, and that meant that until the later 70's, it wouldn't be avaliable.

Those were more than 30 years of meaningless pain for the two random muggles I had found myself saving. I'll figure it out, I promise.

I didn't say it out loud, there was no point in doing so, so I limited myself with keeping company to Marie until she collected herself, noddig briefly to thank me for my support even as she refused to recognize the brief breakdown she just suffered.

"He isn't... he lost everything..."

I shook my head slowly at her attempt to justify him: "He's not the only one, maybe he should learn to focus on what he has instead of what he would have had had the war never come to pass. Being a werewolf is just another hurdle on his path. Do I have to take him back here?"

Marie looked at me then, her expression as controlled as she could make it, before she shook her head.

"There are a couple of broken pieces on the roof and..."

I followed her around the relatively large cottage, repairing with quick jabs of my wand where she pointed me at, and adjusting those parts of their home that I suspected would break down in the future.

I had found this abandoned cottage by chance during my first summer back home, back when I had been learning how to Apparate, and while it wasn't anything glamorous, it was enough for the couple of werewolves.

The potions that I had produced and dosed their vegetable garden with had been more than enough to make sure they wouldn't want for food, while I casually nailed a wild boar when I visited during the schoolyear.

Tracking charms made hunting mundane creatures extremely easy, and cutting charms were enough to kill them more or less painlessly.

Sure, when I sneaked out of Hogwarts after the full moon I used my familiarity with the area along with magic to track the exhausted werewolves and bring them back home, there was no need to risk them dying in the relative wilderness of the forest of Dean, and I didn't feel comfortable in half-assing things.

So, I had managed to somewhat take care of them, and while Paul had remained somewhat aggressive with me, mostly because he associated all the shit that went wrong in his life with my deliberate act of existing, Marie had been almost unnaturally accepting of the new situation.

A few calming charms had been necessary at first, after all, Christian as they were, being told that magic existed had shocked them.

Even worse when they 'translated' the being a werewolf into being corrupted by a demon of some sort.

It hadn't been easy, and I was slowly making sure that the couple could make a living without my help. Hence my studies about werewolves and the general idea of developing Wolfsbane, or a better variant of it, given my outrageous talent with potions.

I wanted to help Marie and Paul, who clearly didn't deserve to lose their normal lives to the wonderful and terrifying word of Magic, but I didn't wish to become the only reason why they were still alive. However, being told that the world is so different from what you know, when they were already so fixed in their ways... it hadn't been fun.

Without calming charms, there was a great possibility for a hysterical fit that turned into a psychotic break.

Still, once I managed to figure out a way to make the two werewolves move back to their cottage once the transformation started turning off, they'd be free from my presence in their lives.

Once I was done checking on Marie's issues, I readied myself once more, and Apparated away.

...

...

After a series of Apparitions that left me with my head spinning, I landed in a clearing amidst Birch trees that still hosted one of the shacks I had realized the previous summer, the necessities for the toilets still perfectly working on one side of the relatively small habitation.

I could have simply pushed through and set up a new shack, south and thusly closer to my next point of referment, but I had months of reduced sleep hours and triple research topics because of the necessity of looking after the two werewolves I rescued.

And so I simply secured my location with a plethora of charms that leveraged my extreme understanding of the concept of 'hidden' and I slept.

With the next morning, I returned to consciousness with a deep sigh, almost phisically feeling the facade of the Slytherin Student fall off to reveal the explorer that I was comfortable as, and after a breakfast composed by a single gulp of a potion that managed to concentrate the concept of 'energy', 'growth', and 'health'.

I pulled out my trusty repurposed telescope, and started apparating.

It wasn't until the late afternoon that I stopped the almost uninterrupted chain of Apparitions, chosing instead to walk with my long legs to the top of a nearby hill. It should allow me to look a little furhter, and if there is someone busy tracking my Apparitions, I'll lose them here.

Beyond a significant stretch of fields that were tinged lavender by the presence of said flowers, I spotted it: the sky reached just a bit too low, its colour shifting lightly, from time to time broken by white wisps. I had reached the Mediterranean Sea

...

That evening found me shifting rocks with a rather impressive sequence of levitation charms, reshaping them as I had seen Minerva do to create the walls that completely hid the corridor where my two firends and I had built our Rùnda, and keeping them together with the potion I had already used several times to bind stones together.

The conglomeration of rocks looked exactly like that from the outside: there were clams and whatnot still clinging to the surface while the waves crashed on the base of my lastest temporary shelter.

The sand was frozen in place by an immobilus charm, and the floor was quickly covered with branches that I cut from trees easily reached just beyond the beach.

Those were dosed with the same potion I had used the year before to forge together the transplanted birch trees that had been turned into walls for my shacks, and once the revitalized branches intertwined with each other, feeding off the energy offered by my brew, I transfigured them into a single, flat piece of wood to insulate me from the cold ground.

After I used a few gouging charms to enlarge or outright create openings in the rocks to let in the light, I studied critically the results of my work. For all of its apparent beauty, I was reminded that a change in Shape didn't manage to approach the real deal.

Oh, to a distracted eye the temporary shelter could look almost cozy, with an hammock hanging from a piece of rock to another and a lit firepit, with its smoke being syphoned out of the conglomerate of rocks. But I could feel the difference.

In the same way a portrait wasn't the actual person, or a stint into Virtual Reality wasn't a combination of events actually happening, I knew that the results of Transfiguration weren't quite real.

We'll need to look over the walls that hide the corridoor on the 4th floor in the coming year. 

And with that thought, I left the shelter in order to cast a sequence of charms that leveraged my understanding of the Shadow, and, with the memory of the brilliant flare of golden flame that I had wielded against thee werewolves, Defiance to keep away any hypotetical aggressor that nevertheless managed to spot me.

"It's not quite a Fianto Duri, but it will give me time to bolt if necessary."

I muttered to myself as transfigured seawater into glass that I used to cover the holes I had poked in the conglomerate of rocks that was my emporary shelter, and once I had drank another sip from my nutritional flask, I finally surrendered to sleep.

It was hours later that I felt it.

Something 'knocking' at the door, so to speak.

There was something that had just interacted with the wards outside my shelter, and I truly didn't want to end up in another situation like the one that landed me with the care of a couple of muggles turned into werewolves.

Worse, it could be something actually capable of killing me. I was far from the relative safety of civilized Magical Society: to be entirely truthful, if a gaggle of soldiers stumbled upon me, I would be hard pressed to disappear without making them think of 'magic'.

I didn't even stop to check outside: I grabbed the few belongings that I hadn't left packed, threw my haversacks over my shoulder and Apparated to a place I had observed before the sun went down.

There was no reason to willingly involve myself in another mess.

I needed the Diadem, if any of the stories about it were true, it would be immensely useful, not only that, but I would remove the artifact from Tom's hands in case he still went on the power-hungry dark lord route

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