Sapphire (Lazuli Book #3) - Harry Potter Fan Fiction (Draco Malfoy)

Chapter Eight

I spent the next few days cleaning up 12 Grimmauld Place.

With Kreacher gone in search of Mundungus Fletcher, Ron and Hermione busy only having eyes for each other, and Harry sorting through Sirius' old things trying to look for any photographs or letters that featured his parents, I was on my own in trying to make the once grand house habitable once again.

For a start, I got rid of the rotting planks of wood that had been nailed over some of the windows, in attempts to keep the light out and the dust in. It took me an entire morning to wrench out the twisted nails and allow sunlight in once again, but finally every room in the house felt the late summer warmth. After transfiguring the wood away, sending it to an abandoned field somewhere, I scoured the expansive library for household care books, and after having little success there, searched Kreacher's pit too. The house-elf slept in what was nothing more than a cupboard in the kitchen, with only a raggedy blanket and a potato sack pillow to make his nights a little more comfortable. It was there that I found a stack of books on household spells, and tried to think of where in that huge house I could start. However the answer was right before my eyes.

Deciding upon my first task, I obtained Harry's permission and then began to fashion one of the smaller, vacant bedrooms into a room for Kreacher. He deserved it after all - his many years of faithful servitude to the House of Black should at least warrant him a suitable place to sleep.

After finding a room, I began to clear out the years worth of useless clutter that had been packed into the unused guest room. Stacks of books (many of which were about the dark arts), paintings and photo albums, trophies, sculptures and trinkets. Anything that wasn't of high monetary or personal value was moved elsewhere - the more pleasant books to the library in the house, sculptures which didn't depict a pure-blood wizard standing above a group of frail-looking muggle-borns to the drawing room to be taken to shops on Diagon Alley.

Once it was clear, I stripped the dusty bed-sheets that looked as if they'd been there for years off the bed, using an enchantment I'd found in one of Kreacher's books to wash the sheets until they were pristine. I hung them over a line I'd set up in the scullery room and then set off with dusting the room whilst the sheets dried.

Ron watched me in disbelief as I made the room nice for the house-elf - even enchanting some runner beans into flowers to be nicely displayed in a vase on the chest of drawers. "Why are you doing all of this? Kreacher is horrible - you saw how he treated Hermione!"

I shrugged my shoulders as I plumped up a pillow. "Everybody deserves a second chance, Ron. And besides, what harm can it do to soften up Kreacher a little bit? It looks like we're going to be here for a while, and I for one don't want to live in a house where I have a house-elf plotting to jeopardise my every move."

That was enough to shut him up, with an exasperated sigh, Ron left me alone to finish making the room nice for Kreacher upon his return.

However Kreacher didn't return that night, nor the next, and soon it was a nearly a week since we'd sent him out to track down Mundungus. With each moment that passed that Kreacher didn't return, the tensions grew. What if he'd found a way to sneak to Bellatrix or Narcissa and tell them who was staying at 12 Grimmauld Place? Harry had left plenty of loopholes in his instructions - what if Kreacher had betrayed us?

By the time the sixth evening arrived, we were all close to the edge. After a dinner of beef and potatoes that we'd found in the store room, we all went up to the drawing room, Ron and Hermione taking a seat at the grand piano I'd spent the morning polishing and Harry flopping down on the chaise longue. I climbed into an armchair and lit the fire with a non-verbal spell, before pulling out a book of household spells and opening it to a dog-eared page, and beginning to read. Tomorrow, I was planning an assault on an infestation of Cornish pixies on the roof, and I wanted to know exactly how to get rid of them for good.