A Theory about Harry's Continued Placement With the Dursleys

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

Some of us have questioned why Harry had to continue to spend several weeks with the Dursleys each summer after Voldemort returned at the end of GoF. If sharing Harry's blood allowed Voldemort to touch Harry, then it seems logical that it would also allow him to bypass any magical blood protections on #4 Privet Drive. So here's an idea, inspired by Arsinoe de Blassenville's The Best Revenge.

Dumbledore could argue that the Dursleys should have custody of Harry, even though they were Muggles, because Petunia was Harry's closest living blood relative. However, his argument probably would not have been especially valid unless Harry had actually lived with the Dursleys for at least a few weeks each summer. If Harry never actually spent any time with the Dursleys, then more distant wizarding relatives might have been able to present a good case for why they should have custody of him instead.

For example, let's suppose that Harry was the grandson of Dorea Black and Charlus Potter on the Black Family Tapestry. In that case, it's quite possible that, in the summer of 1995, Harry's closest living wizarding relatives (who were not convicted criminals anyway) were his second cousins Andromeda Tonks and Narcissa Malfoy. In the summer of 1995, Andromeda Tonks had long since been disinherited from the Black family, and Lucius Malfoy had the ear of the Minister of Magic. So, if Harry hadn't continued to live with the Dursleys for part of each summer, then the Malfoys might have been able to gain custody of the Boy-Who-Lived.

In a sense, then, the Dursleys did provide Harry with a "blood" protection, even after Voldemort returned. But it wasn't necessarily a magical protection; it was a legal one.

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

"Not even I..."

I think Tom's quite vain enough to translate "By experimentation, I can affirm that I personally can't touch him there," into the grand pronouncement, "No one, not even I, can touch him there."

He'd really hate admitting there was something his meanest followers could do that he couldn't.

[oryx_leucoryx]

So do you think he arrived at the conclusion *he* couldn't reach Harry there empirically? If so - when and how?

As Vapormort all he could hope for was to posses Harry and cause him to suicide or go wherever Tom wanted him to go. But maybe Quirrellmort did attempt to invade 4PD that August and we had no idea.

Or do you think Tom based his assumptions on something he or one of his sources learned indirectly, from something that was said?

[lynn-waterfall.livejournal.com]

Maybe Voldemort was just making an excuse for why he hadn't managed to kill Harry before. Or, perhaps he *had* tried to kill Harry, as Vapormort.

As you say, Vapormort could have possessed him, in theory, and Voldemort mentions in the graveyard that animals didn't survive being possessed by him for very long. If Voldemort could have possessed him for long enough, even if he couldn't make him do anything, it would presumably killed him. It'd take a while, yeah, but based on Quirrell's drinking of unicorn blood, it would have been well under a year, and Voldemort was happier possessing things than not, anyway.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Hmm. Is it possible that the events of (or leading to) Dudley's birthday were engineered by Vapormort? Maybe there was a plot that didn't work out? Did he possess the cat that caused Mrs Figg to break her leg?

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

But here's what bothers me....

Tom knew that the protection on Harry's body came from the "old magic" of Lily's sacrifice, AND he somehow learned, whether empirically or by word-of-mouth, that the protections on 4PD were "ancient magic" invoked by Albus "to ensure the boy's protection as long as he is in his relations' care."

Yet he believed that the protection on 4PD still held.

Therefore, if, in fact, the only magical protection on 4PD was one which had been derived from Lily's sacrifice, then we must assume that

1. Tom never once suspected that there might be a relationship between the protections on 4PD and Lily's sacrifice.

2. Tom never once checked to see if the protections still blocked him after he regained his body.

3. Tom never sent any of his followers to attempt to kidnap Harry from 4PD.

In other words, either Albus placed magical protections on 4PD that were separate from Lily's sacrifice, or Tom was a complete idiot.

Then again, Tom also apparently never figured out that Harry was a horcrux....

[sunnyskywalker]

Most brilliant student my... Okay, I can actually accept Voldemort not figuring out the Harrycrux pre-OotP. First, he was in pain and vaporized and probably wasn't thinking straight, and he also had no way of knowing (we think) whether any of his soul just split or actually separated out (having no body to check the changes and having another cause to attribute the pain to), or if it did what it hit (could have been the crib for all he knew). After his re-embodiment, if he attributed his appearance to another soul-bit going missing, he might reasonably have concluded (with or without a search of the Godric's Hollow house) that the errant soul-bit had just whooshed through the Veil or floated off into the atmosphere or whatever soul-bits do when they aren't anchored properly.

Once he started getting into Harry's head, however, he really should have started wondering. Yes, they share blood now... but surely blood alone wouldn't account for that. Unless Tom knows nothing of blood magic beyond that door, which doesn't sound likely considering it's probably a useful avenue of immortality research. I mean, Albus is a blood magic expert, and we know he's another immortality-research junkie. Could Tom have been so proud as to avoid a field Albus specialized in? Sounds a bit extreme and counter-productive, but maybe he'd split off enough soul-bits by the time he went on his grand research tour to seriously impede his logic skills.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Another point: In OOTP Albus didn't quite trust the protections - he had Order members stationed in Little Whinging and when he received evidence that there was some attempt on Harry (albeit by Dolores rather than by Tom or any of his agents) he instructed Harry to stay indoors and 4 days later had Harry moved to 12GP - which apparently had protections Albus trusted more.

Then in HBP he lets Harry spend 2 weeks at 4PD with no special instructions about whether or not to go out (despite the fact that the war was on and dementors were about), and arranged for Harry to spend the June and July of the following year there, again with no special instructions. It is possible that following the dementors attack in OOTP Albus added extra protections for the 2 subsequent summers.

It is also possible that Severus was given the task of playing up the 4PD protections to Tom, to convince him that an attack while they held would be pointless. Voldemort swallowed the story whole, as we see in DH. I doubt the DEs only arrived after the Dursleys left and Harry's entourage arrived and everyone mounted their rides. But they waited until they believed the protection was no longer in force.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

You're right, Tom ought to have assumed that, just as Lily's sacrifice no longer kept Tom from touching Harry now that they shared her blood, so the protections at 4PD ought to be permeable to Tom if they were based on her sacrifice and her "blood" relations.

However--after Harry's escape from the graveyard we see Tom seriously spooked by the boy. Harry destroyed Tom's 16-year-old Horcrux-self and his lovely Basilisk. Harry threw off Tom's Imperius, and he turned Tom's own wand (and a selection of Tom's victims) against him.

For the next year we see Tom obsessed with trying to get that prophecy and see if there's something in it that explains how he can finally defeat the damn little kid. Once he knows that the prophecy has nothing that can help him, he brcomes obsessed with wandlore and getting a wand that can't be turned against him by Harry. (Oops.)

Notice that he doesn't want to go mano-a-mano with Harry after the graveyard until he thought he'd solved the wand problem (take Lucius's). (He does, at the DoM, but that's not his plan--it's his normal temper tantrum at having had his current plan thwarted, KILL THE MESSENGER. And since Harry doesn't lift his wand, but it saved by Dumbles, he's left unsure whether it could have worked had D. not intervened.) Then when Harry's amazaing auto-wand destroys that, he doesn't try again until he's found the Elder Wand and persuaded himself he's now its master.

And at THAT point Tom holds the whole of Hogwarts hostage to force Harry to turn himself over. He could have kidnapped any of Harry's friends, at any time, to lure Harry into a trap just as he lured Harry to the DOM to get the Prophecy for him.

So I think he didn't try to take Harry at 4PD before Harry was moved to 12GP because he didn't want to make another failed attempt on the boy, and wanted to figure out what the BOY's secret was first.

"Not even I can touch him there" because of DD's wards might be just the story he's giving his followers so they don't think him weaker than Harry.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Tom gives that story in the graveyard, just before attempting to kill Harry. At that point he doesn't yet know that the diary and basilisk are gone. He knows Lily caused the AK to rebound back in 1981 and later caused Quirrell to burn from contact with Harry. That's it. Unless he also knows something about the 4PD situation and isn't sharing with us.

Later, yes, he may have been awaiting a favorable situation.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

No, Tom did know about Harry's destruction of both the Diary and the Basilisk as of the graveyard. Scabbers was Ron's rat, remember, and whatever he didn't witness from Ron's pocket or listen to Ron, Harry, and Hermione talk about afterwards (and you can't tell me Hermione didn't demand a full debriefing), he could have overheard Molly and Arthur talking about that summer. And Molly and Arthur know the WHOLE story--they were there when Harry told Albus & Minerva.

I should imagine the fact that Tommy had already had time--months, almost a year--to get over that first killing surge of rage at learning the Diary was lost, and the reflection that he really needed Lucius's connections, was the only reason Lucius survived his bad stewardship.

(Though whatever Tom DID do to punish Lucius was bad enough to scare BELLATRIX.)

[oryx_leucoryx]

I remember very well that Peter was for a while Ron's rat. I also notice that Tom makes no mention of the events of the year of the basilisk - not in his summation of what he could or couldn't do nor in his criticism of Lucius. Tom is unhappy that Lucius could arrange the Muggle-torture event at the QWC but did not bother to seek his Master. Why not also mention that he attempted a little coup a couple of years previously for his own selfish advancement rather than bring his master back to power as he should have by duty? I don't think Peter told Tom any of that by that point. Yes, Tom is a Legilimens and could probably have penetrated Peter's mind even as BabyMort, but if he didn't know what he was looking for he could have simply missed the entire thing. Especially as the events of that year had little emotional significance for Peter.

I'm with Jodel that we can have a good guess as to *when* Tom learned of the loss of the diary. From the moment Tom regained his body until the DOM battle Harry was connected to Tom's emotional state. On August 12th, after Harry's hearing, he experiences an exceptionally strong instance of scar-pain. It is possible that this was the day he asked Lucius about the diary's whereabouts (possibly with the intent of launching it that year, maybe once he learned the full prophecy and had a better idea of how to tackle Harry), learned of its loss and punished Lucius for it.

Of course Rowling may have intended to say that Tom was expressing his disappointment that Harry would be under Hogwarts' protection that year again.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Nicely argued. But-the only reason Tom possibly had to spare Lucius after such a transgression and betrayal was because he NEEDED him (and his connections) desperately.

A) Would Tom have wanted to let his other slaves know that he was so dependent on Lucius as to forgive him such a lapse? (Or dependent on any of them at all?) Would he have wanted his slaves to know they could get away with overtly disobeying his instructions and betraying him, provided only they offered enough when he came to chastise them for their crimes?

B) COULD the Tom we saw have refrained from killing Lucius, had he been accessible when Tom learned the truth? When he learned of the theft (not destruction) of the Cup, he killed not just the messenger, but all of his servants who didn'tmanage to get out of the room first. And Bellatrix expected that reaction to the information that any property Tom had entrusted to her had been stolen.

But at that time Tom didn't know the locket and ring had been compromised, much less destroyed. He's got 6 Horcruxes; one has been destroyed, another stolen (presumably with intent to destroy), but so far as he knew Locket, Ring, Diadem and Nagini are all safe and intact. So sure he is of this he doesn't yet trouble to protect Nagini.

So his reaction is not at learning that he's half-way to being vulnerable to Death, but to learning that he'd lost ANY of his anchors.

To return to the first point: if Tom had known, and raged at Peter (the nursemaid whom he absolutely could not afford to kill in his current weakened state) about faithless Lucius--WOULD have have wanted to bring up Lucius's worst transgression before his fellow slaves, given that he currently needed Lucius too much to give him the punishment the self-serving traitor was due?

He couldn't kill Lucius. Yet. And to let Lucius live, while letting his other slaves know the magnitude of Lucius's crimes against his master, would give the wrong impression.

No. In public, accuse Lucius of some of the other crimes against his master of which he was guilty, those which he shared with almost all of his fellows. Tom's mercy, then, in not simply killing Lucius, is the same mercy he's extending to his other faithless followers. Not an expression of utter dependence.

And not an invitation to every other slave to try the like, provided only that slave hoped he could make himself too useful to the master to kill outright.

[oryx_leucoryx]

There's a big difference between the circumstances of the destruction of the diary and those under which the cup was taken: The diary was destroyed as the object responsible for an immediate crisis. There was no sign that it was destroyed with the knowledge that it was (also) Tom's Horcrux. The cup on the other hand was just sitting quietly in the Lestrange vault, not doing anything, yet the trio entered the vault and took only the cup, not any of the other treasures or magical objects. Clearly they knew the significance of the cup, which means they must have known of at least some of the other Horcruxes. Therefore it isn't hard to see why Tom reacted much stronger to hearing the latter rather than the former.

What is odd is that Tom did not expect the destruction of the diary to eventually lead to a deliberate Horcrux hunt. Either he didn't realize the diary was destroyed by *Harry*, Albus' protege, or he didn't realize how much (if at all) of the diary's behavior Harry reported to Albus. Or perhaps he took the fact that he was able to survive the diary's destruction long enough to return to his body as evidence that Albus wasn't hunting Horcruxes and the reason for that being that for some reason Albus didn't make the connection.

Can we make an educated guess as to how much (or how little) of the events surrounding the loss of the diary Tom learned and which was the more likely source based on his inaction to protect the remaining Horcruxes?