Disclaimer: You Know Who owns Harry Potter and the rest
Author's note: It has been hard for me to pinpoint when exactly Dumbledore spoke to Snape about Harry's death. I'm betting for a few days prior to Ron's poisoning, based on what Hagrid reported. (It's a good moment too because the spouses of the epilogue, were in couple with other people, so no need to bring them to any of this. I hope I'm not wrong. If I am, do tell.) So strictly canon-compliant until the first half of HP6.
"A life for a life"
Even at these hours of the night, the bat-like form of the potions -now DADA- teacher was as out of place in the gold-and-red Gryffindor common room, as a hippogriff swimming in the lake. As he approached Harry, the boy's pleading gaze went to the only other living soul in the room: Hermione, sitting on the opposite corner; she was stiff and watching the professor carefully. No matter how they had fought these last times, no matter their difference of criteria regarding enemies and books, Harry knew she'd intervene if Snape tried to do something to him, and find help if he took him somewhere else, as he apparently planned:
"Follow me, Potter."
The man's expression was inscrutable but his voice had a taint of urgency that somehow made him even more suspicious.
"Can't it wait till tomorrow, professor?"
"I said 'follow me'"
The professor turned, his trademark cloak swing, a reminder that Harry was probably about to meet a death sentence –again-. But his had been a pathetic attempt to delay the inevitable. Certainly, daylight meant nothing to the man's office. Hermione's nod relieved him somehow, but he was still silent and terrified all the way to Snape's office, where weird creatures still rested in baths of disgusting substances.
"Close the door" the professor ordered.
Harry's gaze went to the man and back to the door, as if pondering not to obey, but Snape simply waited, a cold, immutable expression in his eyes, until the Gryffindor complied. And even then, silence reigned in the room, until Harry asked:
"Is there something you want from me?"
The Slytherin eyed him intently, and Harry wondered if he was reading his mind, but this time there was truly nothing there to read. He was simply too confused.
"What I want, Potter, is to preserve your miserable, and nonetheless priceless existence."
Harry's jaw might have dropped to the floor. Not that he believed the wizard, but… had he just called his life 'priceless'? The silence that followed was so absolute that Harry wondered if the rustle he heard came all the way from the Forbidden Forest.
"Professor?"
"I have spoken to Dumbledore" the syllables rolled weirdly, as always, in the man's tongue. "You must know that by telling you this now, I am disobeying a direct order from him. Which I avoid even while facing the Dark Lord, since Dumbledore's scheme is soulless and cunning. Some people call it wise" he said as if he despised the epithet. "So, may you believe me or not, your dear mentor will probably deny all of this."
Perhaps Harry would have defended Dumbledore, but Snape had him ever from the first syllable. Knowing what Dumbledore didn't want him to know. That was a long-cherished dream of his ever since… well, at least since the ending of fourth year. So the boy stayed silent, waiting –hoping- for the man to keep going. Snape took his time. The scarce light danced eerily in the multicolor flasks on the walls. Finally, the boy burst:
"Dumbledore doesn't want me to know… what, professor?"
"That you house a part of the Dark Lord's soul."
Harry stepped back as if he had been physically hit, even before fully comprehending. House a soul? Like a horcrux?
"Hence the connection between your minds" Snape continued, as if not noticing the paleness of his skin. "Hence your ability to speak to snakes."
"Like a horcrux?" Harry asked to himself, without thinking that he might be providing information.
Snape only narrowed his eyes.
"Evidently."
"So… so… What? How do I extract it? How do I…?"
The words 'destroy it' hovered strangely over them.
"The director's opinion, is that you must perform a certain task and then be told that you are to die to Voldemort's wand."
Now it was the word 'die', this time spoken, which hovered. But before Harry could fully comprehend it, Snape added:
"Which is, of course, the reason why we are enduring each other's presence today."
Harry's brain was still spinning with the revelation, and for some moments he stood there, trying to reject the logic in his words, and failing miserably. He felt the urge to fight and defeat, and yet, what was asked of him, was death. At the end, at least. And Dumbledore… If it was true, the old man had been preparing him to… what, die?
"But… but… how? How am I supposed to defeat Voldemort if I'm…?"
"Apparently, your life is not required at the moment of the final battle."
"But… the prophecy!"
Snape found nothing to answer to it. Harry's heart was still beating in his chest, and his panting was so loud he thought he was hearing it redoubled. He almost felt his mind snapping shut. He simply said:
"I don't believe you."
Snape wasn't impressed. He stared at the boy, silent.
"You… you always… always… provoke me. You haven't forgiven my father. You hate me! Why would you save me? No…"
"What reason would I have to lie?" Snape's words were a mere whisper, but their simplicity made them stand over Harry's confused speech.
"I don't know! Why would you?!" Harry everything but cried to the professor's face.
The man didn't as much as blink.
"Ironically enough" he started calmly, "I seem to value your life more than the director does."
Wood moved against stone, and Harry felt himself be pushed towards the chair the professor had just placed behind him; he fought, but then Snape put his wand into his hand and Harry simply stared at it, panting, and then at the man that suddenly looked thirty years older. The boy's mind could process nothing else. The word 'die' was painted in red in the back of his eyelashes, and he was trying hard not to blink.
"In lack of an operating pensieve –such as the one Dumbledore keeps in his office-" he added bitterly, "I will allow you to break into my mind. You are not a legilimens, but I can put all my defenses down so you can find reasons to trust me there. If I do, will you believe me?"
Harry's spirit quieted gradually, until he could understand what Snape was proposing. The professor was still waiting for him to answer.
"What do I do?" he responded, still suspicious.
"I spent a ridiculous amount of nights last year performing the spell on you. If, as Dumbledore claims, you didn't inherit your father's stupidity, you might know it by now."
Putting in the spell all the hate he bore for this man, Harry said: "Legilimency"
An hour later, he stepped out of the man's mind, gasping as if he had spent the same amount of time under the lake. His gaze carried as a mixture of feelings including mainly astonishment, as he stared at the man that could have been his father, had circumstances been different.
"I don't appreciate your pity" this one spit.
His expression was as unreadable as always.
Harry tried to find he loathe he used to feel towards the Head of Slytherin, and couldn't find it. And yet, something in him was still resistant to believe in a destiny that seemed not only opposed to the prophecy, but also to any hope he would still carry for himself. He made a conscious effort to think as Hermione would.
"How do I know that you didn't edit or chose the memories?"
Snape's eyebrows arched.
"To deceive you?"
His expression and his voice showed the scorn he still felt towards his enemy's son, and yet, he grabbed his wand from the boy's unresponsive one, and cast:
"Expecto patronum"
A silver doe laid between them, turned her head towards Harry, and he forgot where he was, lost in her eyes as he had been lost in his own patronus three years ago. As he extended his hand, she stepped towards him majestically, and he almost felt the ghostly coldness and the lovely warmth of her matter in his cheek, when she extended her head to brush it against him. "Mom?" he whispered as she retreated and looked into his eyes. Then, she vanished, leaving boy and man to hide the tears they didn't mean to shed. Tears none of them acknowledged, in themselves or in the other.
"As you must know" the professor continued, pretending that nothing had happened, "there is no one in this school knowing more about the Dark Arts than I do. Despite the director's best intentions, I know how to create a horcrux. And thankfully, I also have some ideas as to how to dismantle it."
"Dismantle…?" Harry's voice was heard, empty of sense or soul; he felt as an echo.
"A horcrux" Snape lectured as if he was describing how to boil Polyjuice "is a receptacle for the soul, and is shaped as such by taking a life. The process involves the soul damage it causes to the murderer, but it does not suffice, as proven by the fact that not all murders –not even genocides- are or can be shaped into horcruxes. The process is… delicate. There are properties inherent to the horcrux itself, such as the durability and the soul previously inhabitant living horcruxes. And there is the damage caused to the natural tissue of life and its balance with death by the abrupt disruption of an existence whose time to cease had not come. I hypothesize the process might be reversed by the horcrux itself, by giving life. That would mend the tissue, and the receptacle would become temporarily inadequate. A life for another. An inanimate object can't give life, but something alive, such as you... well, it's rather common."
They stared at each other, the man, inexpressive, and the boy, confused as he came back to himself slowly.
"Give life, professor?" he echoed. After a moment, his mood was clear enough to understand part of what Snape had said. "Transfigure something into an animal?"
For a second, Harry almost laughed at the simplicity of it. He had done so many times, in class. But then it sank, slowly: that couldn't be it, Voldemort's soul would have been vanished a thousand times already. And yet, Harry was shaken by the utter scandal in the professor's words:
"I mean procreate."
The man's eyes still inspected him, as if he was taking an exam. Harry's consciousness awakened slowly. He couldn't… No, he must be hearing wrong. His voice was thin and acute when he echoed:
"Procreating?"
"I expect you to know about the birds and the bees."
The professor's despise dropped in each word, and Harry knew he was doing a conscious effort to not be too harsh. To be Lily's son apparently gave Harry a right to his life, and to merely the barest trace of respect.
"But… but… You can't be serious…"
The professor frowned as if he was offended of having ever been considered "not serious". Yet somehow, from somewhere –maybe from the utter shock and disbelief- Harry got the confidence to keep speaking.
"You can't suggest… or even condone… Professor! It's… inadequate behavior… underage…"
He was certainly thinking like Hermione in more ways than one. But his words became more and more inarticulate until they were unintelligible, and the professor judged wise to intervene.
"I'm the Head of Slytherin, Potter. I don't care for the means, as far as they meet my end."
"But I can't become a father!"
Snape's eyes were cold as he whispered, in the same tone.
"You only have to give life to something, Potter. I don't care if it doesn't live one week within the womb. I don't care if you gut the embryo and sacrifice it to the fires of Hogwarts; I'd go sing at the ritual, if you did. I'd store it in a flask. I don't care. As long as Lily's sacrifice is honored."
The sweetness with which he pronounced his mother's name, was nearly lost to Harry, as a catalogue of the girls he knew appeared in his mind, and he despised himself even for considering it.
"I can't do this to any girl."
"You can, if you want to live."
"I'll have to see it printed."
The female voice came from behind Harry, and both of them turned to see Hermione walking out of the shadows, wearing the Invisibility Cloak over her shoulders. The professor's surprise showed in his face just for a second, and then he pursed his lips in distaste and stood. Finding himself in disadvantage, Harry stood too, and faced his friend. He would have tried to smile to her, if he wasn't so shocked.
"You won't" the professor answered. "As I said, this is a hypothesis. There are few documented horcruxes, and none of them is human. But there is magic in blood, especially in blood shared with an innocent. You being a muggle-born, you must have heard of heirs, fairytales where firstborns are exchanged for mythical favors…"
"And animals?" she said, as if she hadn't listened to the ending of his speech; she wasn't even aware that she had just interrupted a professor.
Snape stared at her coldly before answering:
"The few animals made into horcruxes have had no offspring, which lead me to believe that either the process made them sterile, or the owner did before storing the soul in them."
"So you don't know if I can make it" Harry interpreted; then he remembered what was the 'it', and paled and blushed in turn.
"I know you must try."
Hermione had to drag him to the Gryffindor tower. Of the fevered speech she uttered all the way there, Harry would never remember a single word. They found Ron in the common room, saying good night to Lavender with a foolish smile in his face; visibly, she didn't repel him tonight, and Harry would have thought of asking Ron about his secret date, had the circumstances been less serious. Before Ron himself started asking them about the reason why they were together and out of the common room at this hours, Hermione gazed Harry and, seeing his lack of disapproval, started telling Ron all the details of their night. Only much later Harry remembered that they were supposed to be angry at each other, and put a name to the gleeful and nostalgic warmth in his stomach: as if he had both of his best friends again.
"So now we trust Snape" Ron said, as if they were asking him to pet a spider.
"I'm confident he was telling the truth."
The red-haired boy's gaze showed only disbelief.
"Ron, he wasn't aware that I was there, and Harry was inside of his mind. Why would he spent the entire hour crying? Sobbing and all…"
The idea of Snape, desperate, was still too new to Harry. The two concepts didn't seem to belong to the same sentence. That didn't but reinforce the feeling that Snape had suffered enough. He warned her with a gaze. Ron must be told something, if he was to understand their sudden change of mind regarding the Slytherin, yet Harry would rather keep the professor's weaknesses a secret, having even refused to tell her what he had seen in the man's mind in detail. To his opinion, he was entitled to his privacy, to his dignity. Being a jerk and all.
He opted for a change of subject.
"But… Hermione… I'm only sixteen! I can't have a child! And every one of the girls in this tower is around that age. Unless I pick a professor…"
For a second he pictured himself trying McGonagall, and he didn't know if he must blush or laugh at the image.
"And I can't go tell about horcruxes to just everyone, and ask gently if they'll sleep with me!"
"Well, I don't think they'll take you as semen donor…" as soon as she named it, she blushed again. "You can't explain it to any healer: even if they believe you and they are against Him, why would they risk helping you? There are other ways of getting rid of a horcrux."
The probability of someone killing Harry had just increased exponentially.
"So I guess we must start immediately…" she said.
"What?"
"The… process, Harry" suddenly he realized that she found it as hard to spell as he did. Yet, she breathed in, found the scientist in her, and extricated them from the equation enough for the next words to sound firm: "As a male, you can engender any time of the month, but any female has a single day in her cycle. In an ideal environment, a male having around fourteen females would have an optimal chance of engendering…"
Ron patted his shoulder, whispered something about getting lucky. Harry ignored him and stared at Hermione. Against all odds, he hoped she would have a solution. She usually did.
"Another problem is that, by living together, all the possible volunteers you have at your disposal have their cycles synchronized so you'll have a single day a month to… solve the problem. But you don't know which one it is. And even if you did, hard as it is to convince someone to sleep with you, it would be worse –culturally speaking- if you planned to sleep with several girls the same night. You'll have to try with a girl one of two days, until pregnancy is achieved."
She was blushing, and still all he could think of, what how smart she was.
"So, any ideas?"
"Not my sister" Ron stated bluntly. Everyone looked at him. "Even if I were OK with it, my mother would kill you."
"Any mother would kill him, Ron" Hermione pointed.
Harry shrugged. Apparently, the killing part was literally everywhere in his future. Maybe Trelawney had been right more than once, after all.
"Maybe Cho?" Ron suggested.
Harry just shook his head. She was one year older than them, so in a slightly-less-bad age to get pregnant, but ever since Marietta's betrayal, he didn't know even how to start speaking to her again, not to say offer to father her child. The child part still made him dizzy.
"Maybe we should gather the DA and ask the girls" Ron said again.
"It'll be hard with anyone not-Gryffindor" Hermione pointed, "because of the logistics: getting together, planning…"
Harry couldn't believe how little he knew about the rest of the girls in his House. Of most of them, he didn't know even the names. He almost lost her next words, and then he nearly wished he had.
"It'll have to be me."
Ron's face turned red as Harry's turned pale.
"No!" they cried at the same time.
"It makes sense" she lectured, "I'm already aware of the problem, I understand it fully, and I'm willing…"
"Everyone but you!" Ron exclaimed vehemently.
She rolled her eyes.
"You just said: not Ginny" she pointed.
"I didn't know you were about to volunteer!"
"You can't be serious!" Harry was exclaiming.
"Why not?" she said, as if they were discussing the climate. "You said yourself you didn't think I was ugly."
It took some moments to place that dialogue. That Hermione would remember something that had happened a year before mustn't come as a surprise –she being brilliant and all-, but it did.
Ron eyed him suspiciously. Well, at least he was still listening. Harry rushed:
"Listen: I suspect you have a crush on… someone, and that someone might as well have a crush on you. You…"
"Harry!" she cut. "I don't care about who's crushing on who. It's your life what is at stake here! We'll do it" she blushed intently, just then recognizing the second meaning of the words, and yet she managed to add. "And that's final!"
Harry gritted his teeth.
"I won't do this to you" he muttered vehemently. "That's final…"
"Say something, Ron!" they both cried at the same time.
The boy was visibly trying to decide if they were both tricking him.
"If you want to be together, you can just tell me, mate" he said at last. "You don't have to tell tales, and this one… this one is way too twisted…"
"Ronald!" she sounded scandalized. "How can you suggest…!"
"Suggest what?!" the red-haired wizard said in a fainted scream. "To want to shag you is not a crime!"
"Ronald…!"
She found herself wordless, and bile rose to her throat, as Ron breathed and raised a hand, hushing them both. Without looking at any of them, he stated:
"If you want to… date, you have my blessing. If the entire story is true, then I'm on Hermione's side. Reckon chess is way easier with a queen… or several... and she's right, as usual. Now I'm going to bed."
He rose tiredly. The smile he had worn before was gone, but Harry bet it was that spirit what still kept him standing, and maybe for the first time, he was grateful to Lavender for distracting his mate. He and Hermione saw him disappear upstairs, and a second later, she stated:
"It'll take him time to process."
"It'll not" Harry cut. "We are not doing this. You are not doing this…"
"Harry, if you think I'd rather see you dead than sleep with you, you are grossly mistaken."
She had stated it simply, not even blushing, as if she was stating one of the twelfth uses of dragon blood. It sent a shiver down his spine –and it wasn't unpleasant, at all-. Yet, he repeated:
"I won't do that to you."
"Oh, you will, Harry. You most certainly will. Even muggle men can be seduced. And they don't even have amortentia. I can boil it, if needed, you know…"
Hermione's eyes were narrowed as if she was working on a particularly difficult transfiguration. And she always managed those. He realized how hard -or sweet?- his life was about to become.
Preview:
Because now, with Ron gone, it was all him and Hermione, and the lioness was literally everywhere: playing with her hair in the common room as she read, sitting in front of him during meals –was she wearing make-up?!-, bending over his shoulder as she pointed out mistakes in his homework, raising her hand beside him in class –his marks should be improving, and they were dropping at record speed because he couldn't take his eyes off her-. She wore a perfume that smelled a lot like amortentia itself did to him, and he thought it was a trick, but then remembered having smelled it in her long before having heard of love potions –when riding Buckbeack?-. Then he started second-guessing what had come first, Hermione or amortentia, and if he smelled that on the potion because he was –even if slightly- in love with his best female friend back then. It was messing him up, seriously. He thought of avoiding her again and couldn't stand the thought.
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