Both boys recoiled at her words. "I'm a Horcrux?" Harry asked. That was horrible, but somehow totally believable. Of course, he could hear snakes and see from their eyes. He was part Voldemort. Sirius had denied anything was wrong with understanding snakes, but Sirius was gone now and everything bad was true.
"We assume it was an accident," Professor McGonagall said briskly as if she could see the way he was spiraling into misery. As if anyone could ever understand what it was like to open your own mouth and –. Harry made himself stop thinking about anything at all and listen to his professor. Maybe paying attention to her would stop the nightmares playing out in his head.
"When Voldemort killed your mother," she said, "Everything went awry you ended up as one of his Horcruxes, and –"
"Does that mean you're going to have to kill me?" Harry asked with dawning horror. Listening had been a mistake. Things started out bad and got worse the more he knew.
He wanted Sirius back.
"Wouldn't put it past the Malfoys," Zabini said darkly. "Kill you, protect their precious Drackey, weasel out of their commitments to him."
"Luring me in," Harry said. "Pretending to –"
"Whatever inane theory about Madam Malfoy you are concocting in your adolescent brain, I suggest you do away with it at once," Professor McGonagall said
"But she –" Harry began. He'd trusted her. He'd called her 'Mum' and the whole time she'd been planning to get rid of him.
Professor McGonagall held up her hand, something tight and controlled behind her eyes, and Harry bit his tongue before he could say anything that would make her truly angry. "No," she said. "I will not permit a word of this. And no one plans to murder you like an animal. The very idea is absurd, and you should be embarrassed you have considered it."
"Then what?" Zabini asked bluntly.
"Throw me in the Malfoy's fiendfyre incinerator?" Harry asked.
"You two are ridiculous," Professor McGonagall said. She turned to the portrait behind her desk. "Would you please be so kind at to tell Professor Snape I would like to see him?"
The portrait sped off.
"Professor Snape? Zabini asked. "What does he have to do with this?"
"He hates me," Harry said. "He'd throw me in that incinerator himself."
"Professor Snape is a gifted potioneer," McGonagall said firmly. "Hogwarts is lucky to have him, and you have been very fortunate to have him as a teacher."
Harry snorted. The only lucky thing about Snape was that he didn't have to deal with the man outside of Potions. He felt sorry for Zabini that the skulking bat was his Head of House.
The door behind them opened and Snape stepped in, all swirls of his cloak and sneers. The man was ridiculously dramatic, and Harry's hatred roiled in his stomach. Officious, bullying, horrible jerk. It was wrong that Sirius was dead and Snape was alive. It should have been the other way around.
"You wanted to see me?" Snape asked.
"Yes," Professor McGonagall said.
Snape ran his eyes over both boys with flat condemnation. "I can only assume the two of them being here together means they have committed some unspeakable act of adolescent stupidity, and you wish to hand Zabini over to me as the head of his House."
"I am afraid not," McGonagall said. She took a deep breath. "How is the potion we discussed coming along?"
Snape's mouth narrowed to a grim line.
"The students are aware of the basic outline of the issue," she said. "And they will not repeat anything that they learn."
"Your faith in human nature is astonishing for a woman who has been teaching as long as you have," Snape said. "But to answer your question, I am quite prepared to pour poison down Mr. Potter's mouth and kill the Horcrux within. For some reason, Madam Sprout's holly was all destroyed and I had to special order some, but it's a common ingredient and easy to find."
"The potions are ready?"
"We can begin whenever you would like."
"Wait!" Harry didn't trust any of this. He knew Sirius hated Snape, which meant he did too. "I'm not letting that bat-nosed, swamp-dwelling bastard pour anything down my throat. He –"
"Mr. Potter," Professor McGonagall said with obvious shock. "Ten points from Gryffindor for your utter disrespect, and you will serve a detention with me after you recover."
"After I recover from him poisoning me?" Harry demanded.
"Shut up, you idiot," Zabini muttered.
"Professor Snape has developed – and I want to be one hundred percent clear how impressive this is – a potion from basilisk venom to burn away the Horcrux you have unfortunately been burdened with. You will treat him with respect."
Harry slouched down in the seat until Professor McGonagall's eyes narrowed and mouth tightened, and then slowly pulled himself back up. She nodded. "I understand that you have suffered a tremendous loss –"
"The mongrel died?" Snape asked archly, "Or was it the werewolf? Or did the werewolf kill the dog at last?"
"Severus, really," Minerva said.
Harry's rage threatened to boil over. How dare this miserable excuse for a rotten teacher stand there and call Sirius a mongrel. Sirius was worth a hundred Snapes. A thousand.
"Try to contain your outrage, Mr. Potter," Snape said with his nearly permanent sneer firmly in place. "Your foster-fathers tried to murder me when I was your age, and thus I find them unsympathetic."
"They did not," Harry said.
"Is this really the time?" McGonagall asked. "And it was a prank gone astray, Severus. I am sure Sirius has apologized since."
Snape leveled a long, steady look at her. "He has not. And I feel confident predicting he will not do so in the future."
Silence settled over the room. Harry opened his mouth to defend Sirius, but Zabini stepped on his foot, and he thought better of it. It wasn't like Snape was going to listen to reason so there was no point in arguing. Harry's jaw settled into a sullen clench as he didn't say all the things he wanted to.
"Regardless of Sirius Black's myriad failings," Snape said, and Harry's jaw got even tighter but he still managed to keep silent despite the glint in Snape's eye and the long pause.
"You have made the potion," McGonagall prompted.
"I have," Snape said. "And the antidote."
"So, you are planning to poison him," Zabini said.
"It baffles me that this is your concern," Snape said. "But yes, as you have so astutely observed, Mr. Zabini, it is generally ill-advised to drink basilisk venom. In this one instance, however, we will be hoping that the Horcrux dies before Mr. Potter does, and then we will be able to give him the antidote."
"Like you'd care if I died," Harry said.
Snape's mouth twisted for a moment, and then he said, "The paperwork would be very annoying, Mr. Potter, and you can be sure I am uninterested in filling out the untimely student death forms, especially as they need to be done in triplicate."
"Oh, well, we wouldn't want that," Harry muttered.
"Indeed, we would not," McGonagall said. She briskly made her way to the door. "But as you are eager to begin a course of Horcrux destruction, shall we go to the Infirmary and take care of it right now?"
Harry and Blaise both stood.
"Not you, Mr. Zabini. You may go to class. Professor Snape and I do not require your assistance."
Harry glanced at Blaise. It was one thing to go fight Horcruxes. It was another to do it alone. He'd never been alone. Not really. All of his pranks – all of his adventures – had happened with Draco at his side. And he'd planned to do this with Blaise there. Not his brother, not the way Draco had been, but a comrade in arms. "I'll come up and see you after dinner," Blaise said, and he sounded as uncertain as Harry felt.
"An excellent idea," McGonagall said. "You can bring him his homework." And with that, she herded Harry and Snape out of her office and down the corridor toward the Infirmary, leaving Blaise in their wake.
Once there, Harry was unceremoniously directed to a bed and handed a goblet filled with golden bubbling liquid. It smelled like a summer day lying in the grass, and when he took a cautious sip, bees buzzed around his head. He'd rather expected it to taste terrible – potions usually did – but he couldn't drink it greedily enough. He wanted to lick the last few drops from the bottom of the glass but made himself hand it back for fear of Snape's curled lip.
And then the pain hit.
He was burning. Flames sped their way down his throat and into his belly, and from there reached out for all his limbs. Arms, hands, feet – everything was on fire and when he opened his mouth, curdled black smoke came out along with words he wasn't saying.
"She never loved you, you know. Your lifelong devotion to this fantasy is pathetic."
Snape's eyes narrowed, but McGonagall put a hand on his arm. "It would seem your potion is working. Nasty things, Horcruxes. They reach into our minds and pull out our worst fears as weapons."
"Behold the wisdom of the unwanted harridan," Harry's mouth said. "At least Snivellus has a great love in his fantasy life. All you have is cats."
Her thin lips got thinner. Then Harry screamed as the smoke tried to choke him. He clawed at his throat and vomited great heaves of black sludge the ate into the stone floor like acid. He was going to burn to nothing, he was nothing. The only thing that had ever made him worth anything was the sliver of Voldemort's soul, and now that was being torn from him and he began to fight to keep it. Without that, he was only an unloved orphan boy, sent to live behind a tall gate in filthy, Muggle London every summer, cut off from –
White clouds gathered above him. They were clouds of cotton, and they drifted slowly across a blue sky. Harry could feel his head hitting the pillow as he fell back and there was no need to breathe anymore. It was done.
Then an arm pulled him up and an irritated voice said, "Assuming you do not want to die, Mr. Potter, open your fool mouth." A glass was held between his lips, and something cold poured in. It ran down over his face, but he was able to open his mouth to say that he didn't want this. Didn't need this. They should just let him die, but whoever had a hold of him used that chance to pour an entire goblet of the stuff into him. Harry gagged on the taste. Wisdom and patience and sorrow and hope and he didn't want any of it until he did. Until he was taking hold of the glass himself and drinking the rest.
Severus Snape pulled himself back from the bed with a moue of distaste, and Harry realized with horror the man had been cradling him in his arms.
"I need a shower," Harry said. He needed to wash off any memory of Snape helping him, not to mention the black ooze and the spilled potions.
"You do indeed," Professor McGonagall said, and he was directed to a small washroom. When he came back out, he was informed by McGonagall that he would stay on the now clean bed for the rest of the day for observation and that she expected him to use this time wisely and write much better essays than he had been doing of late. Harry sat down in a bit of a daze, wearing clean clothes that weren't his own. Snape was gone. All evidence of the fit and the filth had been scoured away.
"Did we do it?" he asked.
McGonagall's mouth softened. "I believe so," she said. "You did well. Sirius would have been proud."
Harry wasn't so sure about that. "The things I said –"
"Oh, I am aware that was the Horcrux and not you, Mr. Potter," she said. "If the words had been coming from you, they would have been significantly more laden with obscenities."
#
Draco leaned back against the window seat. The Gryffindor common room was comfortable and worn and cozy, and for five years he'd loved it. He'd loped between its sagging chairs and overloaded tables, fully confident he belonged. And it wasn't that he didn't, but everything felt weird. Harry still wasn't speaking to him, and since they shared a room with Ron and Neville, it wasn't like their fight was a secret. Neville just shrugged and went back to writing in the diary Draco had given him years ago. He didn't care about anyone else anyway. But Ron loved gossip which meant everyone knew. And it was probably his imagination that everyone was stealing glanced at him out of the corners of their eyes, but that didn't make him any more comfortable.
"It's not fair," he said for the twelfth or twentieth time. "I didn't do anything."
"He's just upset," Hermione said. She nudged him with her foot. "He'll come around."
"It's awful," Draco said. He reached over and laced his fingers through hers and she squeezed his hand. It was more awful than he knew how to say, and he wanted to tell Harry he was sorry, and that he'd loved Sirius too. That he wished more than anything that it hadn't happened. "I wish I knew what to do."
Hermione looked thoughtful for a moment, then she gathered up all the books and planners and half-written study guides she had spread around her on the window seat. "We'll go to the library," she said. "There has to be something about how to destroy these Horcrux things, and we can figure out how to help."
"You always have the same answer," Draco said, but he stood up.
"And I'm usually right."
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against him. Her hair smelled like shampoo and was as familiar to him as his own hands. All the stuffed otters he'd collected, none of them right, then this one girl with her otter Patronus turned out to be what he'd been looking for. He couldn't imagine life without her.
"Merlin," Fred Weasley said walking by.
"The two of you –" George added.
"It's creepy is what it is."
"You should date other people," George said knowingly. "It's downright weird the way you two act like an old married couple."
"Disturbing," Fred added.
"Messed up."
"You're only fifteen."
Hermione shrugged, clearly indifferent to their opinion. "Some people just find who they need early," she said.
"You started something like dating when you were first years," Fred pointed out.
"What can I say," Hermione grinned. "I'm precocious. Ready to go to the library?"
"I'd follow you anywhere," Draco said.
"Also," George called after them. "Your dates suck. The library? Really?"
"Really," Hermione said, and gave him a quick wave before climbing through the portrait hole and heading off to find out what they could do about Horcruxes.
. . . . . . . . . .
A/N – Thank you to torrilin for beta reading