Chapter 401: Chapter 401: Number 12, Grimmauld Place (Edited)
Tom: Huh?
Mr. Granger startled Tom with his sudden act, leaving him confused.
At that moment, Tom didn't understand why Mr. Granger was doing that, and he went along without fully grasping it.
On the side, Hermione understood her father's thought and felt embarrassed. What was her father thinking? Hermione couldn't help but tease that she and Yodel were the clean and pure ones, while her own father had impure thoughts on his mind.
After making a fool of himself, Hermione was taken upstairs by her mother, leaving Tom and Mr. Granger alone in the living room. Mr. Granger took Tom's arm and dragged him into his bedroom.
The room was spacious, with a double bed in the center, a dresser in one corner, and a huge wardrobe that melded into the wall. Along with numerous photographs of the Granger couple scattered everywhere, it wasn't hard to guess that this was the host's master bedroom.
Tom decided not to say anything and went straight to the bathroom attached to the room. He took a hot shower and felt refreshed. When he came out of the bathroom, he noticed that Mr. Granger was already asleep on the bed.
Tom was getting ready to lie down when he suddenly remembered that he hadn't placed his Christmas gifts under the tree. He got off the bed and approached the bedroom door. To his surprise, the door was locked, and he couldn't find the key anywhere.
Tom turned the doorknob twice, but the wooden door didn't budge an inch.
"Where are you going?" The sound of the door awakened Mr. Granger, who propped himself up on one elbow, with sleepy eyes, looking at Tom.
"I forgot to put my Christmas presents under the tree for tomorrow..."
"Tomorrow morning, I'll go with you. Now go to sleep quickly."
Tom's instinct told him that something was amiss, but alcohol had dulled his mind, and what Mr. Granger said made sense, so Tom didn't argue and obediently lay down on the bed, entering the world of dreams.
...
A few hours ago.
Sirius landed in an empty square, surrounded by a desolate wasteland. Harry looked around, trembling not out of fear but because of the cold enveloping him in the air.
Everything was dark, the street lamps barely emitted light and seemed ready to go out at any moment. The nearby houses had a gloomy appearance, with many broken windows. The peeling doors and trash-covered stairs all revealed the neighborhood's decay.
Sirius found a spot to park his motorcycle and secured it. Then, he led Harry across the meadow and a street until they stood in front of a residential building.
Standing outside the building, Harry could clearly hear the deafening music blasting from the speakers, as well as smell the stench of decaying garbage. Even the Dursleys would be repulsed passing through this place, considering that the dirt on the ground would soil the tires of their new car.
"Is this your home?" Harry looked at Sirius.
"Let's say it is," his godfather replied absentmindedly, while observing the building in front of them.
The building was peculiar: the house adjacent to number 11 was number 13, and number 12 had completely disappeared. This was strange because even to avoid the unlucky number, it would be logical to eliminate number 13, but why conceal number 12?
After a brief moment, the walls of the building turned rubbery, and a broken door emerged between numbers 11 and 13, followed by dirty walls and windows. In no time, a house "squeezed" and appeared.
While all this happened, the people living in house number 11 didn't seem to notice anything, as if nothing was happening.
"Es just a little trick; most wizarding families living in Muggle areas do this," explained Sirius Black to Harry about the concealment charm on his house. "Well, stop standing there, come inside with me."
He led Harry up the weathered stone steps to the front door of his house.
Sirius's house door was in poor condition and didn't live up to the prestige of his ancient pure-blood lineage. It was covered in scratches, and the black paint had peeled off. The only impressive thing was the silver ring on the door, shaped like a coiled snake and looking exquisite.
Sirius pulled out his wand and tapped the door, producing a resonant metallic sound and a jingling like chains moving behind the door.
The grand door in front of Harry creaked open, revealing a dimly lit foyer. Sirius entered first, followed by a whisper of sounds, and then a row of antique lanterns on the wall lit up. The lantern light filtered through the frosted glass, creating a sense of unreality and mist.
Harry noticed that most of the furniture in the house had snake-like shapes.
"Haha, luckily the lights still work!" Sirius exclaimed cheerfully. Due to his good mood and being back in his home, his voice sounded a bit louder than usual.
Before Harry and Sirius could do anything else, they heard...
"Beasts! Despicable! Offspring of dirt and sin! Bastards, monsters, deformed abominations, be gone from here! How dare you defile the ancestral residence of my family?" A horrible, deafening, spine-chilling scream echoed from behind two hole-ridden velvet curtains, and in the next second, the curtains opened automatically, revealing a portrait roughly the size of a real person.
The portrait depicted an old woman, spitting saliva and her eyes rolling in their sockets. Her yellowish skin was taut from the scream, and she waved her clawed hands as if trying to scratch Harry and Sirius's faces through the portrait.
However, when Sirius approached while covering his ears, the old woman closed her mouth. Her eyes widened, and her face turned pale. "Sirius Black, you... you've really... come back..." she said in a trembling voice.
She stopped screaming, and her eyes regained composure. Harry saw a flicker of sanity in her gaze, something that hadn't been present moments before.
"You've come back," she said in a much more normal tone.
Sirius looked at her in silence, as if examining her face, comparing her current appearance to his memory of her. Finally, he nodded wordlessly.
The old woman watched him in silence.
"I've come back... Mother." Sirius hesitated for a moment and finally uttered those words with effort.
The old woman nodded, and perhaps it was an illusion on Harry's part, but he seemed to catch a fleeting glimmer of relief in the old woman's expression.
"From today, you are the new head of the Black family," said the portrait of the old woman to Sirius.
Chapter 402: Chapter 402: Christmas Gift (Edited)
"From today, you are the new head of the Black family," the old woman said. After uttering these words, the expression in her eyes disappeared, and madness once again overtook her gaze.
"Beggar, family shame, the bastard I sired!" she exclaimed with wide-open eyes, loudly.
At the same time, Sirius felt like he was establishing a mysterious connection with the ancestral mansion.
"From now on, I am the head of the Black family..." Ignoring the screams from his mother's portrait, Sirius muttered to himself, "Ha, I don't need her recognition; I was always the heir to the Blacks..."
"If the young sir desires, Kreacher can close the curtains and allow the old mistress to rest in peace," resonated a hoarse, deep voice like a frog's.
This voice startled Harry, who lowered his head to seek its source, only to discover it came from a house-elf. The house-elf looked very old, with skin that appeared several times larger than its body needed, and the excess skin hung loosely on both sides. It was nearly naked, wearing only a dirty rag around its waist. It had a bald head like all house-elves, but tufts of white hair protruded from its two large bat-like ears.
Harry studied its face closely and noticed that its eyes were watery and cloudy, filled with bloodshot veins. Its fleshy nose was pig-like in size, but its expression was not as friendly; one could even say it was hostile.
"Kreacher? I didn't expect you to still be alive," Sirius said in surprise. When he fled home, Kreacher was already very old, so seeing Kreacher still alive was a big shock.
Kreacher bowed shakily before Sirius, nearly hitting the dirty mat with his nose. As he bowed, he muttered something under his breath, "Cursed ungrateful bastard, he has wounded her heart too much..."
Perhaps he thought he was only saying it in his mind, but he said it aloud, despite the roars of Walburga Black trying to drown him out; both Harry and Sirius could hear him clearly.
Sirius's face suddenly changed.
"Enough, close the curtains immediately!" he said sternly.
Kreacher bowed again to Sirius and snapped his fingers, and the curtains in front of Walburga Black's portrait closed. The old woman's scream vanished, leaving only an echo of silence.
Sirius took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. At that moment, Kreacher was nowhere to be seen.
"Follow me," Sirius said as he led Harry for a walk around the house and finally chose a room that wasn't as dirty and deteriorated to sleep in.
"I'm sorry, Harry, for making you stay in such a place on Christmas Eve..." Sirius felt guilty and remorseful, realizing he hadn't considered the cleanliness of his own house. Something he never had to think about as he was always a privileged young man who didn't have to clean up after himself. Hogwarts had no cleaning activities like deep cleaning because there were hundreds of house-elves to maintain the school's daily cleanliness. And when Sirius became an adult, he was sent to Azkaban, where no one would ask him to clean his room...
So he never had that awareness. Only when he returned home today did he realize that the entire house was practically uninhabitable. His own house-elf had become senile and was acting erratically, so he couldn't trust him to clean.
Do it himself? Forget it. Staying in a hotel seemed much better, and it wouldn't cost much.
"It doesn't matter. It's still much better than the Dursleys' place," Harry replied with a smile, casually shaking the bed sheets and causing several mice to scurry away.
Harry, Sirius: ...
"That Dursley family really lacks hygiene manners," Sirius said with a complicated expression. He genuinely believed the Dursleys were very dirty. If Vernon and Petunia heard him say that, even though Sirius was a wizard, they would probably pick a fight with him.
"Let's forget about it. Follow me." After seeing the mice lurking on the bed, Sirius completely abandoned the idea of spending the night there and took Harry to a hotel on Diagon Alley.
...
On Christmas morning, Tom unsurprisingly overslept. He was eventually awakened by a pillow thrown by Hermione.
"Hermione?" Tom struggled to sit up, his head buzzing. He looked around, but Mr. Granger had already disappeared. In his place were a bunch of packages.
As expected, I drank too much! And Mr. Granger didn't even wake me up! Tom thought to himself.
Then, suddenly, he shivered and covered his body with the blanket. "Hermione, get out of here! I'm not dressed yet!"
Hermione rolled her eyes. "Do you really think I care? Look, Christmas gifts, take them!"
She tossed something onto Tom's bed and walked out of the room.
Alright, I really didn't expect Tom, who usually appears modest, to be so... well-endowed. Hermione recalled what she had just seen and blushed as she quickly walked away.
Tom quickly dressed, freeing himself from the embrace of the blanket, and began to unwrap his Christmas gifts one by one.
What he was looking forward to the most was the gift Hermione had given him. He unwrapped the gift wrap, and a blue woolen scarf appeared before his eyes.
Tom took the scarf in his hands and caressed it, feeling that it should be wool. After confirming the material, he carefully examined the appearance of the scarf and noticed that it looked good from a distance, but up close, it was woven somewhat irregularly, and the stitches weren't very tight. Considering the craftsmanship, it was undoubtedly hand-knitted by Hermione.
Inside the scarf, there was also a small card with elegant handwriting that said, "Don't say it's poorly knitted."
Tom grinned foolishly and then buried his nose in the scarf, taking a deep breath, feeling a fragrance accompanying a few strands of wool entering his nose, making it itch in both his nose and heart.
Impatiently, he put on the scarf and tested it. Although it looked average, when he wrapped it around himself, it was extremely warm.
"Hehehe, it's very comfortable," he murmured. At that moment, he noticed that inside the package Hermione had sent, there was another box. Tom opened the box and found it filled with perfectly arranged chocolates.
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