HP: I AM SHERLOCK HOLMES

Finding Ravenclaw's ghost, the Grey Lady, had been considerably easier for Sherlock than it had been for Hermione.

And getting answers out of the Grey Lady had proven, if anything, less of a challenge still.

The details of exactly how need not be dwelt on.

The Room of Requirement.

It still wore the same warm, cozy look Gemma had given it back when she'd first decorated it.

Ron wasn't there today—he was busy off on a date with Lavender. Ever since the two of them had officially started going out, they'd been all but inseparable, joined at the hip morning to night.

Which left only three people in the Room of Requirement just now: Sherlock, Harry, and Hermione.

When Sherlock told Harry and Hermione the Grey Lady's true identity, the two of them froze in perfect unison.

"What do you mean? The Grey Lady is—she's actually Rowena Ravenclaw's daughter?"

Harry and Hermione traded a look, disbelief threatening to spill right out of their eyes.

The blood related daughter of one of Hogwarts's four founders had been drifting quietly through this castle as a ghost for who knew how long—and somehow, nobody had ever known.

"Sherlock, why did the Grey Lady become a ghost in the first place?" Hermione was the first to recover.

"Yes—and here she is, supposedly upholding Ravenclaw's whole legacy of wisdom, and yet she went and did something monumentally stupid."

Sherlock said this lightly. "I find it rather baffling myself—that a woman like this could possibly be Rowena Ravenclaw's own daughter."

Hearing Sherlock deliver this blunt an assessment, Harry and Hermione exchanged another glance.

That comment could not have sounded more like something out of Sherlock Holmes.

"Unfortunately, reality doesn't need to make sense.

"Logic is required of deduction. Reality has no such obligation.

However absurd a thing may be, if it happened, it happened."

Meeting his two friends' looks of surprise and curiosity, Sherlock slowly related what he'd learned.

While Lady Grey had still been alive, her name had been Helena Ravenclaw.

In those days, Hogwarts had no Sorting Hat yet, so every student who entered the school was placed into a House by the choice of the four founders themselves.

Naturally enough, Helena had been chosen by her own mother, and so she went into Ravenclaw.

As her mother, Lady Ravenclaw had hoped ardently that her daughter would inherit her wisdom and her power, and carry the spirit of Ravenclaw forward into greatness. Unfortunately, she had only ever taught her daughter how to use magic and had neglected her moral education entirely.

What happened next was almost impossible to imagine.

No one could quite fathom how Helena Ravenclaw's mind worked, but somehow, she came to feel jealous of her own mother—of Rowena Ravenclaw's wisdom itself.

She became fixated on the idea, stubborn and irrational, that her mother's peerless intellect—unmatched in its age—owed nothing to talent or a lifetime's accumulated learning, and everything to the diadem resting on her head.

It was this absurd obsession that drove her, in the end, to commit the first of her foolish acts.

"Don't tell me—she stole the diadem?"

Putting it together with the rumours of the diadem's disappearance, Hermione arrived at the thought immediately.

Harry blinked, startled, and then a helpless expression appeared on his face.

He found himself recalling something Sherlock had once said about Cho Chang's former friend, Marietta Edgecombe.

Ravenclaw's wisdom, in the end, could never outgrow the thorns creeping through the heart.

That had been true now. Apparently, it had been just as true back then.

Jealousy of another's intelligence had bred greed—and the person she'd envied had been her own mother.

Mycroft had been right. This Lady Grey really didn't seem to be particularly bright.

"Obviously, my friend." Sherlock spread his hands.

Having stolen the diadem from a mother who had never once guarded herself against her, Helena fled in a panic.

She put as much distance as she could between herself and Hogwarts, then Scotland, and finally left Britain's shores entirely.

One could well imagine what this did to Rowena Ravenclaw—it lodged itself as the deepest thorn in her heart.

She was heartbroken, and she was ashamed.

Heartbroken, because she had been betrayed by the person closest to her in all the world.

Ashamed, because she believed she had failed to raise her daughter properly.

Out of this tangle of feeling, she kept the secret buried, insisting outwardly that the diadem was still exactly where it had always been.

She kept it hidden even from the other three founders of Hogwarts, without a single crack showing.

And that was precisely why the story handed down through history claimed only that the diadem had "vanished after Ravenclaw's death"—no one but mother and daughter ever knew that it had, in fact, been stolen long before.

Not long after this, Rowena Ravenclaw, her heart consumed with grief, fell gravely ill—bedridden, wasting, unable to rise.

As the saying goes, there is no love so aching as a parent's for a child.

Even as she lay dying, the one thing this great witch could not let go of was the daughter who had betrayed and fled her.

In the end, she could not bear it. She begged someone to go and bring Helena back to her.

That person's name was the Baron.

He had been a Slytherin student in Helena's year—carrying in his bones that Slytherin stubbornness, that refusal to abandon a goal once set, and beneath it, a love for Helena he had carried, hidden, for years.

The Baron did not fail the charge given him. He truly did track Helena down, in the depths of the forest where she'd gone to ground.

But—as the saying goes, a parent's heart dwells in her child, while the child's heart dwells in a stone.

Perhaps out of shame. Perhaps out of fury. Perhaps both together.

Whatever the reason, upon hearing that her mother lay dying, Helena's heart remained stoney. She flatly refused to go with the Baron to see her mother one last time.

The Baron had always been a man of hot temper and an unforgiving nature to begin with. Watching the woman he had gone to such lengths to find respond with nothing but cold, unmoved refusal—the anger in him caught alight in an instant.

And Helena, proud to the very last, spoke with nothing but contempt for the way he'd once courted her back at school, and outright, cutting rejection for every declaration of love he'd ever made her.

Every word landed like a needle dipped in fire, driven straight into the centre of the Baron's heart.

Rage overwhelmed reason. Love curdled into venom.

At last, the Baron's fury broke, and something monstrous rose up in him to answer it.

On the spot, he drew his weapon and ran her through.

Helena never imagined that the lovesick fool who'd once trailed after her could become a wolf like this. Caught entirely off guard, she died there and then.

It was only when he saw the blood, glaring and unmistakable, that the Baron came suddenly back to himself.

But by then the harm was done—the die was cast, the rice already cooked. No amount of regret or agony could call back a life once it had gone.

There was only one thing left for him to do.

He picked up the very weapon that had killed Helena, and turned it on himself.

The Baron's regret for what he had done was absolute—so absolute that it had not faded even across the centuries since.

And so, to this day, he still wears heavy chains, and his form is forever marked with blood that never dries.

That is the mark he carved into himself, for his own sin, for all time.

"Wait—Sherlock, hold on a moment!"

At this point in the story, Harry's head suddenly snapped up.

"You're saying his name was the Baron, that he still wears chains to this day, drenched in blood—you don't mean he's—"

"Harry, you've spotted it."

Sherlock smiled faintly and nodded.

"This Baron, the man Lady Ravenclaw asked to go find her daughter—he is Slytherin's House ghost. The Bloody Baron."

At this, Harry and Hermione both drew a sharp breath at once, shock and disbelief churning in their chests.

Who could have guessed that Ravenclaw's Grey Lady and Slytherin's Bloody Baron—each a ghost belonging to a different House—shared this bloodied, love-and-hate-tangled history behind them.

Life and death, love and hatred, all frozen together in that distant forest, a secret no one had ever known.

"As far as I know, no one among the staff or students of Hogwarts has ever known how Helena and the Baron died, or why they became ghosts bound to this place."

Sherlock's voice had returned to its usual even tone as he went on.

"Even the other House ghosts know nothing of it.

"One could say that from beginning to end, only the two people who actually lived through it—Helena and the Baron—have ever truly understood what happened.

Everyone else simply believes the Grey Lady to be a timid, cowardly ghost.

And yet, all these years, she's gotten along perfectly well with Ravenclaw's own students.

Whenever someone in the House loses something, or misplaces an object, all they need do is ask her, and she can tell them exactly where it is.

If a student can't work out the riddle to get into Ravenclaw Tower, she's happy to help them along.

It's simply that, given the limits of her wisdom, there's only so much help she's ever really been able to give."

Once Sherlock finished speaking, the Room of Requirement fell into a brief silence.

Harry and Hermione exchanged another glance.

Sherlock's disdain for Lady Grey—for Helena Ravenclaw—had been laid out plainly, right there on the table, for all to see.

In truth, Harry and Hermione felt much the same.

It was one thing not to be clever. It was another thing entirely to lack any self-awareness on top of it—especially given how coldly she'd treated her own mother's feelings.

Only, right now, Hermione's mind was still tugged toward another, more pressing question. She set the feeling aside and pressed on urgently: "But the diadem—Sherlock, how did Ravenclaw's diadem end up in Voldemort's hands?"

"That would be the second foolish thing she did.

The moment this self-righteous woman sensed the Baron closing in on her, she hid Ravenclaw's diadem inside a hollow tree, in the very forest where she'd taken refuge."

Sherlock's tone had cooled several degrees, his contempt sharper than before.

Hearing this, Harry felt his thoughts snap into a clarity he'd never quite felt before. His heart gave a sudden lurch, and the words tumbled out of him before he could stop them:

"Don't tell me—she told Voldemort about it?"

At that moment, Hermione finally understood, too, why the Grey Lady had never told this to Dumbledore or Flitwick.

She still had her pride.

"Obviously, isn't it?"

Sherlock let out a cold laugh.

"A soul that had lived over a thousand years, that had witnessed the world turn again and again through every upheaval it had to offer—and in the end, she was talked in circles by some sweet-tongued boy not even a fraction of her age, and handed over a secret of that magnitude, just like that."

"Oh, don't be so harsh, Sherlock." There was a note of reluctance, of sympathy, in Harry's voice as he spoke gently. "The Grey Lady's hardly the only one ever taken in and parted from something precious by Voldemort's silver tongue.

"You know as well as I do—that's always been the one thing Tom Riddle was best at."

He meant, of course, the owner of the house-elf Hokey—the witch named Hepzibah Smith.

Hermione nodded along. "Honestly, Helena had been careful enough. When I went to find her, she wouldn't tell me a thing.

"It's just her bad luck that she ran into Tom Riddle, of all people—someone born with a gift for getting into people's heads."

As she said this, she stole a glance sideways at Sherlock, and swallowed back the second half of the sentence that had been rising to her lips.

'And Sherlock Holmes.'

Clearly, the very fact that Sherlock had managed to get all this information out of Helena said quite enough on its own.

"That's only because she'd already been fooled by Voldemort once before."

Sherlock said this without a trace of mercy.

"If a person still hasn't learned her lesson after that, well—she might as well have lived all those years for nothing."

Harry: "..."

Hermione: "..."

You make an excellent point. We have nothing to say to that.

"So the facts of the matter are these: Voldemort wheedled the diadem's location out of Lady Grey, retrieved it himself, and turned it into a Horcrux."

Harry pieced his thoughts together slowly, laying them out one by one.

"Precisely."

Sherlock inclined his head, and added, "The timing was shortly after he left Hogwarts, and before he took the job at Borgin and Burkes."

"Which means the diadem should still be there—in that hollow tree, in the forest?" Hermione pressed further. "Sherlock, did Helena say exactly where that forest is?"

"Albania."

At the sound of that name, both Harry and Hermione went visibly pale.

Harry couldn't help a low exclamation. "There again!"

Back when Voldemort had been struck down by the magic of love, torn apart and scattered to nothing, it was there that he'd gone to hide out, clinging to whatever half-life remained to him.

Then, more than ten years later, sheer luck had struck—he'd happened across Quirrell, of all people, who'd brought him back to Hogwarts.

Later, once Sherlock had seen through Quirrell's disguise, Voldemort had fled once more, and returned again to Albania.

Then, three years after that, his luck had struck again—this time he'd crossed paths with the addle-headed Bertha Jorkins, and with Blacklight, who'd gone there expressly to find him. That time, when he left, he'd come away with an actual body, and staged his triumphant return as a king reborn.

It seemed clear enough that Voldemort held a particular fondness for that desolate, forsaken forest—he'd made it his shelter, his hiding place, again and again.

"So the diadem should still be in that forest—"

Harry fell into thought for a moment, then looked to Sherlock.

"Sherlock, should we tell Professor Dumbledore about this? That place is simply too far away—I imagine he's the only one who could possibly retrieve the diadem now."

"That is certainly one possibility, my dear Harry."

Watching Harry, so earnest, so eager to strategize, Sherlock's lips curved once more into a faint smile.

"However, I've thought of another possibility as well.

And confirming that possibility happens to be a good deal less trouble than making the long journey to Albania.

"I must say—my luck, it seems, hasn't been half bad."

Harry and Hermione both froze, faces blank with bewilderment.

"Yes."

Sherlock inclined his head slightly, his tone calm, and yet each word landed with weight.

"I found Ravenclaw's diadem."

Before the words had even finished settling, he raised his hand slowly, under the wide, startled eyes of Harry and Hermione, both faces struck through with shock.

Something was set down, gently, on the old wooden table before the three of them.

⊂（￣▽￣）⊃

For one long moment, the very air around them seemed to freeze solid.

Harry and Hermione's eyes went wide, their gazes locked fast to the tabletop, breath going careful and shallow without their even noticing.

It was a crown, worn by what looked like centuries of erosion.

Its metal frame had dulled and faded, long since stripped of any trace of its old brilliance.

Even the gemstones set into it were caked thick with grime, dim and lightless.

Its whole surface was covered in scratches and mottled marks, hardly showing a hint of the splendour that should have belonged to one of Ravenclaw's great treasures.

Another Horcrux had surfaced.

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