Dumbledore and Harry's Adventures

Elves and Portraits

"So... this is your home... it's... nice?"
Harry had not remembered falling asleep the previous night, nor did he remember being taken to his bed at Albus's apartment. All he knew was that when he woke up, he felt mentally refreshed and ready to take on the world.

At the moment, "the world" currently consisted of whispering in Sirius's kitchen at 12 Grimmauld Place, sitting at a filthy table along with Sirius, Remus, and Albus (Dobby had taken one look, refused to enter unless he was given leave to start cleaning, and then left for an unknown location). The house was, as a generous person might observe, in a state of poor repair. A less generous person would call it a dark depressing dump of a house. It appeared to have not been dusted, cleaned, nor maintained in well over a decade.

Sirius chuckled silently, trying not to wake the portrait of his mother (Walburga Black). It had been quite jarring to Harry to be the surprise recipient of a long series of invectives as spoken by a highly angry portrait. In comparison, the muttered insults from the House Elf, Kreacher, were downright pleasant.

"I've been here for around a week, Harry, so I haven't had much time to clean up before you arrived. And, while I appreciate the polite lie, it's not necessary. I hate this place and will be happy for the next leg of our journey to start."

"Sure, but it can't take that long to use a simple cleaning charm to take care of the dust. Did you honestly not find a free hour to do that?"

All three men chuckled at that, confusing Harry.

"What?"

Albus's eyes twinkled. "We'll let you know in a moment. Go ahead and try to clean the corner of the kitchen over there."

Harry looked to where Albus was pointing and directed his wand towards the corner. Silently he cast the scouring charm that Remus had taught him. He had easily cleaned his room with it when he was in Egypt (as the sand got everywhere), so fully expected to see the spell spread and clean the entire room. The spell splashed against the corner and the dust and filth disappeared as expected, but only from the tiny spot where the spell hit. The surrounding grime remained unaffected.

Harry frowned, focused on a new spot and poured more power into the spell. The grime disappeared even quicker than before, but the radius of cleanliness remained unchanged. After staring at the two miniscule spots of cleanliness for a moment, he looked back at the three men.

"That should have worked. With the amount of energy that I poured into that... I would have cleaned our hut in Egypt in seconds. What happened?"

Remus responded in his kind teacher tone of voice. "If you truly read the full text of the book where you learned the basic cleaning spells, you should already know the answer."

Harry sighed. Remus was a fine teacher, compared to most of the staff of Hogwarts he would rate as terrific. But, learning from the books was just so dull when compared to what he learned in Albus's lessons. When given the chance between reading three paragraphs on the scouring charm, or figuring out how to shoot snow flurries from his palms, well...

Closing his eyes, he entered his mind and focused on the memory of reading the textbook. He relived opening the book, reading the text and clearly seeing the words describing the instructions for casting. The other words, those not directly relevant to casting, became blurry. That was the section of the text that he had skimmed, and those random words he had alighted one while skimming were clear. Harry groaned as he realized he really needed to start fully reading the texts that Remus assigned if he was going to full take advantage of his Occlumency skills.

Opening his eyes, he looked back at Remus's expectant expression and furrowed his brow. "All I can remember is how to cast the spell, and the phrase 'magic rich' written a few times."