Author: Clara Fox
Title: Please
Summary: Harry faces the most anguishing decision of his life, and it may make him understand Snape better than anyone else alive. Set just before the final battle of the final book.
Rating: M for character death
Disclaimer: Jo owns these characters, and their real story will be told by her.

Harry burst into the room to find his best friend dead and the smartest witch he had ever met frozen in horror.

Ron lay on the ground, just as Harry had once seen him in his mother's worst nightmare. Eyes open and unseeing, lanky limbs outstretched, head fallen limply to the side. Just like Cedric. Just like Dumbledore. Just like Harry's parents.

Hermione still wasn't moving. Through his numbness, Harry realized that she wasn't paralyzed with shock, but with magic. He raised his wand automatically and uttered a counter-curse. Hermione collapsed to the ground, unshed tears now falling freely from her eyes. Harry ran toward her, but she recoiled violently before Harry could reach her.

"Don't touch me!" Hermione's eyes were feverish, her wand pointing at him.

"Hermione, what are you doing? What happened?"

"Harry… he – Voldemort – he killed Ron. He killed him, Harry." Her words seemed to gag her, and she collapsed again, dry heaving.

"Where did he go? I've destroyed the cup – you were right, Hermione, it was the last Horcrux. He never did have time to make the sixth one before he attacked me that night. I can kill him now… I'm going to kill him, now."

"No. You can't."

"What do you mean? Hermione, you're under the Imperius curse, you're not in control of yourself."

"I'm not cursed, Harry. No, I was right; that cup was the last Horcrux. But you still can't kill him. He's made another one."

"Another Horcrux?" Harry's eyes went back to Ron's body, and he thought he might vomit. "Did he – he… used Ron, didn't he?"

Hermione nodded helplessly.

"What did he do with the Horcrux? Did you see him do it?" Harry could hardly see Hermione now, his rage had spread to every part of him. It left him with one thought, one purpose. It didn't occur to Harry to be thankful that Hermione had been spared, or even to wonder why.

Hermione nodded again, and seemed to steel herself. "Harry, it's me."

Harry didn't understand. "Did you see what happened to the Horcrux?"

"Harry, I am the Horcrux."

Harry's furious sense of purpose seemed to ebb all at once. "What?"

"He petrified me, and then – and then he killed Ron. And then he made me the Horcrux."

All of Harry's consciousness rushed toward the thing he knew Hermione was about to say. Every part of him flailed against the inevitability.

"Harry, I love you so much; I know you love me. But you've got to kill me."

"I can't. Do. That."

"You have to, you know that."

"Hermione –"

"I said I would be there with you, help you however I could. This is my part, Harry. It's the only way for you to beat him, now."

Hermione had stopped crying. She stood facing Harry, her face calm, her eyes gentle.

"Harry, please …"

A look of hatred and revulsion settled on Harry's face as he raised his wand and pointed it directly at Hermione.

.

A/N: Honestly, I myself hate this idea... I'm sure it's been suggested somewhere, but I had been blissfully ignorant until it whammed into my brain yesterday in the middle of writing something completely different. I wrote it down in an attempt to exorcise it from my head, and now I've gotten it out of my system, I hope my feeling of terror that it might actually happen (this way or the other way around) will subside. -clara