The Last Chance Of Tom Riddle

She woke to someone splashing water in her face. “I forbid you, do you hear me?! I forbid the interrogation; my client will not speak with you until the effects of the Serum wear off! You will kill her!” The venerable lawyer’s voice rang with such resolve that it was clear he was ready to draw his wand to protect Aola. “Your client is lying!” Mrs. Weasley replied angrily. “She has every right not to testify against herself!” Maitre Fabre cut her off. Harry lowered his wand, from which a fine mist had been showering the milady, and helped the girl sit up. “You won’t tell me the truth no matter what, will you?” he asked dryly. “I will not, because the Non-Disclosure Charm will not allow me to. And because I want to hide the truth from you and your colleague,” Aola answered honestly, breathing heavily and fitfully. The spell and the Serum were fighting within her, demanding opposites, and it was quite painful. “Do you really still love him enough to protect him even when he’s dead?” Harry didn’t even try to hide the surprise in his voice. Then again, Bellatrix had been as loyal to the Dark Lord as a dog. But this was a different case… “I do,” the Duchess replied defiantly, straightening her back even though her whole body was trembling. “Not another word!” Maitre Fabre roared, stepping toward the Aurors and casting a temporary Deafening Charm on his client. Hermione grabbed her friend and pulled him into the corridor. “I knew she was lying!” “A Horcrux? Could there have been a Horcrux? But that’s simply impossible!” “A living person as a Horcrux was also impossible, but you were one! She’s hiding something serious, Harry, something very serious!” “We need another warrant; we have to find this object.” “We have no idea what it even is! She could have hidden it in a thousand places! We have to persuade the Duchess to lift the charm… Force her under the threat of Azkaban!” Harry looked at his friend and asked quietly: “And what if she has ALREADY brought him back to life?” All persuasions, threats, exhortations, and even pleas shattered against the cliff of Aola’s silence. She did not say another word—not to Harry, nor to the judge who considered her case in an expedited manner. “Aola Brigitta Zerin Augustina, Duchess Merovingian, you are accused of breaking protective seals and intentionally withholding information capable of harming wizarding Britain. You are sentenced to indefinite imprisonment in Azkaban. You will be shackled and escorted to the prison, where you will remain until you come to your senses and provide frank and truthful testimony regarding the charges against you! At that time, your case will be reviewed in light of newly discovered circumstances.” The judge’s gavel slammed onto the table, and she indifferently held out her wrists for the shackles. “Don’t worry, it won’t be for long! I will get you out, my dear; I am filing an extradition request immediately!” Maitre Fabre vowed before Aola was led away. The faithful Abu remained to serve his indefinite sentence for complicity right inside his lamp. It was sealed and transferred to Azkaban along with the guards. Anger and bitterness—that was what Harry felt as he watched her slender figure go, an expressionless look on her charming face and her head held high. Even shackled, she managed to maintain her posture and a graceful gait. Such a beautiful, pleasant girl… why? Why was she doing this? Was it truly love? What exactly had she done? Was she hiding the last surviving Horcrux or had she already returned her beloved to life? Harry wanted to wake up and realize that everything happening was just a bad dream. Twenty years… Twenty years of a peaceful life—and the nightmare was repeating itself. Had that creature truly achieved immortality?! But the judge had already prepared a warrant to search the Merovingian castle—Harry had to act to protect his loved ones from what this small woman might have brought back into the world. As the Duchess was led down the narrow, dark corridor of Azkaban, Fenrir Greyback pressed his hideous face against the barred window of his door, greedily inhaled her delicate scent, and made a lewd joke. “Better howl over your wasted life, you mangy dog,” milady dropped in the language of the steppe wolves without turning her head. The werewolf understood her and grinned joyfully. It seemed there would now be someone to exchange a few words with that the others wouldn’t understand a damn thing about! That was the only thing she said during the entire journey. The thick door slammed shut behind her, and Aola was left alone in a tiny, damp cell, compared to which the room in the Ministry basement seemed quite habitable. Her hands were shackled tightly, palm to palm, and chained to her leg irons at waist level. In the practice of holding prisoners in Azkaban, someone like her had never been encountered before, and no one knew how else to deprive the milady of her ability to cast spells. They couldn’t exactly cut off her hands, could they? Sitting on the hard stone bench that also served as her bed, she surveyed her meager dwelling and suddenly smiled, brightly and joyfully. Maitre Fabre had managed to fulfill her request and whisper it to her while Harry and Hermione were out of the interrogation room. It was all a trifle—the chains, this prison. The main thing was that the Mongolian girls were alive and well. Tom hadn’t just avoided killing anyone—he had saved the life of one of the girls when a crazed camel attacked her. The Duchess felt so good because she and the shaman hadn’t miscalculated, because Tom hadn’t disappointed… To hell with Azkaban. If Maitre Fabre failed to deport her to her homeland, where her connections gave her a much better chance of freedom, she would simply charm some naive guard and escape… She didn’t intend to spend her eternal life in this box, unable even to scratch her nose properly. At the same time Aola was thoughtfully smiling in her cell, the noble Gringualda lay in a deep faint on the family sofa, and the Aurors of both Ministries were ransacking the office, bedrooms, and laboratory, trying to find anything that could be connected to the Dark Lord. Exhausted, Potter only made it home by midnight. Not a single object in the castle responded to the banal but effective: “Accio, Horcrux!” However, if the object was charmed against it, it wouldn’t respond. Harry hadn’t really expected it to. And the pile of sifted through artifacts, each with a neat tag and description (a habit of the archaeologist owners to keep everything in museum order), had nothing and could have nothing to do with Voldemort. They also combed the surrounding territory, with the same zero result. However, according to the Duchess’s cousin, Baron Di Lorio—who endured the search much more stoically than his mother—Aola had a Peri tent, but where it was kept and how to enter it without the owner, the Baron had no clue. Despite the late hour, a family council gathered in the living room. Present were a distressed Ron—blaming himself for not immediately detaining the suspicious girl—and the Potters' godson, Teddy Lupin. The Aurors hadn’t dug up anything concrete, but they knew one thing: the Duchess was hiding something related to Voldemort so carefully that she was willing to risk her life and pay with her freedom to keep the truth from surfacing. This meant they had to assume the worst—the Dark Lord had been reborn, and they all needed to be on guard. “I’m going to Hogwarts in the morning—the children need to be warned,” Ginny said. “Maybe it’s better to bring them home?” Ron suggested. “All the teachers will be warned, and the magical security will be tightened. Aurors will patrol the school day and night,” Harry said. “I’ll handle it personally. It will be much safer at school.” “Right… safer… If I remember correctly how many times you were nearly killed there… we all could have been killed there at least once!” Ron grumbled. “Harry’s house would be the first place I’d attack if I were in his shoes,” Hermione replied. “I suggest we all move.” “Uncle Harry, do you think he’s strong enough to dare attack Hogwarts again? You defeated him, more than once!” Teddy exclaimed. “He doesn’t even have any supporters left on the outside—those who aren’t dead are in Azkaban.” The war with Voldemort was shrouded in an aura of dark romance for the young man, and although his parents died in that war, he felt no fear of the Dark Lord. “Defeated… but at what cost, Ted? I don’t want to pay it again. If this Aola had a hand in Voldemort’s resurrection, I don’t even know what to expect from him. She is skilled in Eastern magic; she doesn’t even use a wand. Heaven knows what she’s capable of!” And here, another unpleasant surprise awaited everyone gathered. Hearing the name of the Dark Lord’s beloved, the ginger changed expression in the most literal sense of the word, and the family immediately pounced on him, demanding an explanation. “Does she happen to look like this?” Ted asked timidly, fumbling with his smartphone and showing a photo of the girl he had met on the ferry. “Yes, that’s Aola Merovingian,” the stunned Harry confirmed. To Mr. Potter’s great dismay, his godson was head over heels in love with the cursed Duchess and didn’t even intend to hide it. A generational conflict flared up in minutes… “You don’t understand anything!” the young man seethed. “You don’t know her! She’s very good and couldn’t have done anything like that! She doesn’t belong in Azkaban!” “Death Eaters killed your parents, Theodore!” Hermione reminded him harshly. “I haven’t forgotten that for a second!” his eyes flashed bright green with emotion, then immediately darkened. “But Aola has nothing to do with it! She didn’t participate in the war; you said yourselves they broke up more than seventy years ago!” “She told me personally that she still loves Tom Riddle to this day, curse him! Wake up, Ted, you’ve just been brainwashed! She’s a Peri, basically a Veela!” Harry rarely lost his temper, but admittedly, things had piled up… “You know what… I’m going to go and talk to her myself.” “No one will let you into Azkaban, Ted; you’re not a relative.” “You forgot, I’ll be an Auror in a year! I’ve already been to Azkaban for training,” the ginger gathered his ruffled feelings, returned to his usual appearance, and stood up. “Where are you going, Ted?! Are you going there right now?” Ginny looked at her husband in despair. “I’m not letting you go anywhere,” Harry snapped, “at least not at night,” noting with horror that right now he reminded himself disgustingly of Uncle Vernon. “Going to stop me by force?” the offspring of the determined Nymphadora inquired boldly. “Leave him, Harry, let him go,” Ron intervened. “Did you listen to your elders much at his age?” “It was a different time and a different situation; we often didn’t have a choice!” Harry exclaimed. “But Teddy has one, doesn’t he? Let him go and figure it out for himself. He’s of age,” Ron replied, and Hermione looked at her husband as if seeing him for the first time. “It just gets better and better!” she exclaimed when the front door slammed shut behind Teddy. “Fleur told me that her relationship with Victoire has been a bit strained lately—Ted hardly wrote to her in the last couple of months, rarely called, and didn’t visit. They’re young, it happens… They’ll fight, they’ll make up. Who knew our Teddy had fallen in love with a grandmother from the century before last!” Ginny said in despair and headed resolutely for the sideboard. A good swallow of firewhisky or gin wouldn’t hurt anyone right now. While the Aurors, led by Harry, were setting up additional protection around the school and instructing teachers and students, and Lady Merovingian was meeting her first morning in prison, the one everyone so feared was calmly moving through Hogwarts, unrecognized by anyone, preparing to conduct his first-ever Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson. Mr. Riddle had finally closed an ancient gestalt using a banal Polyjuice Potion, while simultaneously getting within spitting distance of Potter’s offspring. And the venerable Neville Longbottom*, the killer of his beloved Nagini and the actual DADA professor, lay stunned, with a severely battered memory, in the wardrobe of his own teacher’s bedroom. Quite the gambit. *Um… Since the book states that Neville became the Potions professor, and Wikipedia says Herbology, let’s have him be the DADA teacher for our story.