NaNoWriMo continues, with some major work done on my favorite HP project. This chapter has gone through innumerable rewrites and revisions, and I'm glad to finally be done with it. There were parts of it that were uncomfortable to write, and that's a large part of what was giving me so much trouble. The earliest drafts in particular were very unsettling and I hated them. I think I finally managed to get it to a place where I can live with it.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

The first few days after Valentine's Day were some of the happiest in a long while. But in the weeks following, Harry and Ginny inadvertently fell into something of a rut. They had enjoyed their break from the constant stress of trying to work out the cause of their situation, and in the absence of any new ideas on how to approach it, they just sort of...let the break linger on. Every time Harry felt guilty about this and told himself it was time they get back to it and try and do something, he found another excuse to keep putting it off. There wasn't even anything to do via their grand plan; they had agreed to wait until May to deal with Lockhart to avoid catching anyone else up accidentally in the jinx on his job.

By the time Ron's birthday rolled around, he was thinking maybe enough was enough. He had to do something or he'd drive himself mad.

It was the evening after celebrating, and Ron was desperately trying to finish the homework he'd neglected for his birthday, and Hermione was endeavoring to help him in a rare burst of academic generosity. Harry was lost in his own thoughts, which was proving a dangerous place to be of late.

He'd just caught himself looking at Alicia and her friend Romy Teague, who had shed their school robes and were lounging by the common room fire in snug fitting jumpers and jeans, and he felt thoroughly disgusted with himself. This had been happening more and more frequently, and no matter how furiously he told himself he was being disgusting, he couldn't stop it.

He had thought it bad enough the first time it happened when Cho had hugged him, but at least that time he'd had the excuse of her pressing her body up against him. A natural reaction, he told himself. Copmletely involuntary. Now he was essentially ogling fifteen year-olds without even realizing he was doing it. Even Ginny had started to notice the shift in his attitude, though she hadn't been a bed of roses herself the last few days if you asked him.

'What's got you in such a foul mood?' she asked, plopping down next to where he was sitting on one of the sofas. He clenched his eyes shut in an attempt to purge the image of Romy's sweater and Alicia's jeans from his mind.

'Nothing,' he said. He'd always thought he could tell her anything, but not this.

'Don't do that,' she said crossly. 'We promised we weren't going to do that.'

He surruptitiously glanced around to make sure no one was listening. They weren't, but he wordlessly cast muffliato anyway just in case.

'I'm not doing anything,' he said, striving for calm. 'I'm just in a bad mood. It happens.' He gave her a meaningful look. She must have caught his meaning, because she narrowed her eyes.

'Well I don't know about you, but I do have an excuse,' she said.

This caught him off-guard. Both that she admitted it so readily and than she apparently had something to be upset about.

'What's that?' he asked, unsure if he should be concerned.

'Nothing terrible,' she said, though the look on her face implied she wasn't being entirely honest. 'I've just been getting my first visit from...an old friend.'

'What?' Harry asked, completely lost.

She rolled her eyes. 'Oh for...I've got my period, Harry,' she said.

'Oh,' he said, feeling a bit stunned. He hadn't expected that, though perhaps he should have. They were that age, after all, as his own problems reminded him so frequently these days.

'Yes. On top of the general unpleasantness, it caught me by surprise,' she said. 'I distinctly remember it not happening until well into second year.'

This definitely caught his attention.

'What?' he asked, sitting bolt upright. 'That's a huge change, isn't it? I mean, we're not talking about a small difference here; this is months!'

'That's what I thought,' she said. 'Especially when I found out that childhood trauma can supposedly make it happen earlier, not later, but I'm thinking maybe being possessed isn't the kind of trauma they usually have in mind.'

'You reckon that's it?' Harry asked, still worried.

'It must be,' said Ginny, shrugging. 'Nothing else major has changed that I can think of. Unless it's just my adult brain telling my body to get on with it.'

'It could be that,' Harry offered.

'Possibly,' she conceded. 'Either way it's not like it'll cause any huge problems for us. Just a bit of an inconvenience and discomfort for me before I was expecting it is all. But now I've gone, it's your turn. What's been bothering you?'

Harry almost laughed. 'If you'll believe it, I've been having the exact same problem.'

She arched her eyebrow at him. 'You're having your period?'

This time he did laugh. 'No, you dozy...puberty.' Now that he said it out loud, it really was kind of funny. Still disturbing and embarrassing and he was still ashamed of himself, but funny.

'Oh. Ooooohhhh.' Ginny's eyes went wide. 'So you mean you've been walking around with...' she trailed off but looked pointedly at his trousers.

'All the bloody time. It's maddening. I don't remember it being this bad before.'

'You're used to having an outlet,' she said. Then she grinned so wickedly he thought his entire body might explode. She knew he knew what she meant. What that outlet was. Who it was. He felt his blood rush to his face and one other place and prayed everyone still had their attention elsewhere; he didn't dare check.

'Bloody…! Merlin, you can't do that!' he whispered, even though his anti-eavesdropping charm still held.

She laughed delightedly. 'Oh please, you love when I do that,' she said. 'Besides, I'd rather you wank to memories of me than whatever else you boys do to cope. Face it, Harry. We're going to be just a couple of randy teenagers again. And we're going to have to deal with it for at least a few years before we can do anything about it without feeling gross.'

Harry was taking deep breaths in through his nose. He'd managed to get his blushing and his heart rate under control, if not...other things. He grit his teeth at his fiancee's cheek. He did love it when she teased him, but only when it carried the possibility of leading to something. The thought of doing anything with her as she looked now made him feel more disgusted than catching himself staring at Alicia's bum. The wave of revulsion that came over him was at least enough to finally settle that last piece of him down, thank Merlin.

'This is the worst,' he said. 'The absolute worst. Of everything that's happened to us so far, nothing has been anywhere near as bad as this.'

'Aren't you exaggerating a little?' Ginny said, still chuckling.

'Definitely not,' he said. 'Before, I still had all the feelings for you but none of the physical urge, so it was at least bearable. Now I've got the feelings and the urge, but you're not...you, and it just...I can't...'

'Hey,' she said, reaching out to put a hand on his knee. She casually looked around the common room as she did it, but apparently saw nothing worth pulling away. 'I get it. Believe me, I do. And it's a good thing you're not getting the urge from looking at me. I'm happy I'm not marrying a paedophile; I am. But I meant what I said earlier. We still have the memories of what it was like to be together. That was real. Don't bottle everything up; it's not healthy. You remember what it was like to be going through this, right? How frustrating and confusing it all was? Well how would twelve year old Harry feel knowing what it was like to shag a twenty-three year old witch?'

'A bloody gorgeous twenty-three year old witch,' he managed to say. She smiled. Harry nervously glanced around again. Muffliato or no, he couldn't shake the feeling this definitely wasn't a conversation they should be having in the common room.

'We'll get through it,' she soothed. 'If this is the worst of our problems from here on out, we'll be getting off easy.' Only the tiniest quiver of her lip told him she was teeing him up on purpose.

'Hopefully not too often,' he said. 'We do have other things to do.' She laughed, and the cloud of misery and self-loathing lifted. Not entirely, but it became much easier to bear. Once again he marveled at just how much he loved this woman. That should have been hands down the most awkward and uncomfortable conversation of his life, yet he felt no trace of embarrassment. The next few years of waiting were going to be absolute torture, he was certain, but it would be worth it.

'We probably should have gone somewhere else,' she said, echoing his own thoughts. 'There are going to be rumors about us.'

'Let them say what they want,' said Harry, feeling loads better than he had just ten minutes ago. 'It'll die down before long, and they'll end up proven right eventually anyway.'

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

The month of March passed by with little incident. There was a third dueling club meeting – Professor Kettleburn was the assistant this time – but it went very poorly as Lockhart obviously had nothing new to teach them and no one was interested in another long, drawn out tournament bracket. Most everyone left disappointed and Harry did not expect there to be a fourth meeting.

Truthfully, the most interesting part of the meeting had been Professor Kettleburn, whom Harry had never properly met before. He was a grizzled old man whose somewhat gruff demeanor reminded him a lot of Aberforth Dumbledore. His right leg was wooden, like Mad-Eye Moody's, and his left arm was simply gone below the shoulder. Either there were no magical arm prosthetics available, or else the aged professor simply couldn't be bothered with one.

Harry and Ginny did start working on their problem once again, but were unable to make any more progress than before. And they had to take another break before the end of the month, since they finally had another project to work on that would be occupying most of their free time, not to mention the Room of Requirement. Brewing a potion that takes nearly two months to complete necessitated a good hiding place, and Harry was not as confident as his younger self had been in the seclusion of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.

'This is going to be really difficult,' Ginny said on the first night they first set up their cauldron and ingredients. 'I mean, I know we've been preparing for this all year, but now that it's finally time to do it, this feels really daunting. It's like taking N.E.W.T.s all over again.'

'It's definitely going to be the hardest thing we've ever brewed,' Harry agreed. He knew what she meant; all year he'd been telling himself that when the time came, they would be up to it. But looking at the recipe now, with everything in front of him, his doubts were coming back tenfold.

'We should have brewed a test batch,' Ginny said ruefully. 'We've had too easy a time of things and we've gotten overconfident.'

'We could always go with one of the backup plans,' Harry suggested.

She considered this for a moment before shaking her head. 'No,' she said. 'They're backup plans for a reason. They'd be just as tricky to pull off and are less likely to work, not ot mention more likely to expose us. Besides, I don't like the idea of giving up before we've even tried.'

Harry couldn't help but agree with this. Still, there had to be a way to -

'I've had an idea,' he said. A mad idea.

'What is it?' she asked.

'I dunno how much it would help, but it's better than nothing.'

'What is?' she asked again.

'You'll see,' he said, and pulled out his invisibility cloak. 'Wait here. It'll be faster if I go by myself.' He threw it over himself and hurried to the door.

'Harry, you twit, stop being mysterious and tell me!' she yelled after him, but he was already closing the door behind him.

He'd gotten rather used to sneaking around the castle without the crutch of the Marauders' Map over the last year and a half. Still, it was relatively early, and he had to go all the way from the seventh floor to the dungeons and back again, so he made sure to be extra careful.

He passed Professor McGonagall on the fifth floor, and Flitwick and Sprout on the fourth. Peeves was bouncing around in the entrance hall, but thankfully didn't notice his soft footfalls.

It wasn't until he was descending the familiar staircase into the dungeons that it occurred to him he could have planned this better. If Snape was in his office or his classroom, or if what he wanted simply wasn't there…

There was nothing for it but to press on, unfortunately. If Snape was there, he'd either have to wait for the git to leave or else try another night. And if the book wasn't there…well, they'd be no worse off than they already had been, at least.

He crept down the corridor toward the Potions classroom, but before he was even ten feet from the door he could hear someone – Snape, almost certainly – moving around in there. He cursed. Would there ever come a time when that man wasn't inadvertently in his way?

Not having the patience to sit around, and not wanting to return to Ginny empty-handed, Harry pulled out his wand and wordlessly cast a number of charms down toward the far end of the corridor that did nothing other than make a colossal amount of noise.

Snape, as expected, appeared in the doorway of his classroom within seconds, looking furious. He peered down toward where the commotion had come from, and when he didn't see anything he went to investigate, his great black cloak billowing behind him. Harry, fully aware he was being reckless and irresponsible but unable to make himself care, took the opportunity and dashed into the classroom without even considering Snape might not have been alone.

Rather fortuitously, in hindsight, the classroom was indeed empty. Or appeared to be. Remembering Dumbledore in the room with the Mirror of Erised, he cast homenim revelio. Anyone there might feel it coming over them but would have no way of knowing who cast it. Unless it was Dumbledore, but the odds of him sitting around invisible in Snape's classroom in the evening were acceptably long.

The spell indicated he was alone, so he hurried over to the cabinets at the back of the room. It had been a while, but he was fairly sure this is where he and Ron had initially found their "temporary" textbooks for Slughorn's class.

He conjured himself a stool, thinking he could just vanish it afterwards rather than using one of the many already in the room and risk Snape noticing it had been moved. He would not put anything past the man.

He had to open a few different doors before he found what he was looking for, but even though there were half a dozen books in there (much more than he remembered), he recognized the one he wanted immediately. How much time had he spent poring over its pages in sixth year?

Just to be extra certain, he flipped open the cover, and there in Snape's familiar teenage handwriting was the inscription, "This book is the property of the Half-Blood Prince".

Hearing movement out in the corridor, Harry quickly (and silently) closed the cupboard doors, jumped down off the stool, and just barely managed to vanish it before Snape appeared in the threshold. He did not pause, as he might have done had he heard or suspsected something suspeicious, but rather sttomred over to his desk muttering angrily to himself. Harry silently let out a breath. He'd had closer calls to be sure, but as long as he could make it out of the room without Snape hearing him, it was looking like he'd get away with no one the wiser this time.

Of course, as soon as he thought that, of all people Filch appeareed in the doorway. Harry cursed inwardly.

'I heard some kind of commotion, professor,' he said.

'Students misbehaving, no doubt,' Snape snarled. 'There was no one at the end of the corridor when I went to investigate, though you are more than welcome to have a look for yourself.' The implied dismissal was clear, and Harry found himself actually grateful to Snape for once. A moment later Filch was out the door and Snape was once again devoting his attenton to whatever he was doing. Harry had almost made it to the door when the only person less welcome than Filch appeared. Now Harry wasn't just annoyed; he was legitimately afraid.

'Have you discovered anything, Severus?' Dumbledore asked politely. Dumbledore, who knew Harry had an invisibility cloak, and who for all Harry knew could detect his presence in the room without even having to cast a spell. The old headmaster made no sign that he'd noticed anything, though that meant very little.

There was very little Harry could do. He considered petrifying himself, to avoid accidentally moving or making any noise, but Dumbledore would surely notice the spell being cast. He merely made an effort to breath as softly and lightly as possible.

'No,' Snape replied to Dumbledore's query. 'Basilisk venom is dangerous enough on its own; it isn't used in any potions I could find that would be any worse than the venom itself. Certainly nothing anyone could brew in the castle without importing additional ingredients.'

'Yes, that was my conclusion as well,' said Dumbledore. 'How puzzling.'

'Have you considered it was the teeth themselves they were after, and not the venom?' Snape asked.

'I have. But unless you've had better luck than I, I could not uncover anything anybody might want to do with them.'

'No,' said Snape.

'Very puzzling indeed.'

'If you already knew all this, why ask me for help in the first place?' Snape asked. 'And why after so long?'

'It is never wise to assume one knows everything, Severus,' said Dumbledore. 'Indeed it was the very fact that I could not find an answer that had me convinced I must be missing something. Whoever took those teeth did so for a reason, after all, even if we don't yet know what it is. I value your expertise, Severus; never think I do not. I asked you for help because I hoped you might possess knowledge that could perhaps fill the gaps in my own.'

'Who else have you consulted on this?'

'Hagrid, of course, and Silvanus. But both have admitted to me that Basilisks were never precisely within their primary areas of comptence. Minerva, too, remains just as flummoxed as the rest of us.'

'This is when having a capable Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher would be useful,' said Snape. It sounded like a point he was used to making.

'Truly. But are you not always trying to convince me, Severus, that you would be perfect for the position? Yet you have just confided that you are no closer to solving this riddle than I am. Is there perhaps someone more qualified that you would like to suggest for the position? Assuming Professor Lockhart does not return next year, that is.'

Harry couldn't see Dumbledore's face properly from the angle he was at, but he could tell the old man's eyes would have been twinkling just then.

'Very funny,' said Snape, clearly unamused. 'Have you considered asking Slughorn?'

Dumbledore sighed. 'It is possible Horace might know something neither of us has considered, but I do not consider that possibility strong enough to burden him with it.'

'You don't trust him.'

'I trust Horace with a great many things,' said Dumbledore. 'But the fact remains that I would consider it wisest, for the time being, to spread news of what we are researching as little as possible.'

'I shall consult my home library,' said Snape. 'It is possible, if unlikely, that I may find something there that we have overlooked.'

'Very good, Severus. In the mean time, I shall return to Madam Pince and see if there have been any new developments on that front. Good evening, Severus.' Perhaps knowing he wasn't going to get a response, Dumbledore turned and left the room without waiting for one. Snape stared after him for a few moments before once again diving back into his work. Harry waited until he could be certain Dumbledore wasn't coming back before creeping out of the room himself.

Marveling at the conversation he'd just overheard, Harry fretted over just what kind of unforeseen messes he and Ginny were inadvertendly making for themselves.

One other thing occurred to him as well. Dumbledore had clearly not wanted to mention such a thing to Snape, but Harry would eat his own hat if the wily old headmaster had not considered destroying hocruxes as a possible use for basilisk venom.

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

When he finally returned to the Room of Requirement, it was to find Ginny reading a book on time turners.

'Took you long enough!' she said, looking up at him and closing her book.

'Ran into Snape. And Filch. And Dumbledore.'

'Bloody hell,' said Ginny, her eyes wide. 'Did you at least get what you were looking for?'

'I did, but listen to this first.'

He relayed to Ginny the conversation he had overheard.

'Well, we knew they weren't just going to forget about it,' she said when he was done. 'If anything, I'd take it as a good sign that they still don't have any leads. Less likely they'll stumble onto us, isn't it? Maybe if nothing happens for long enough they'll just think we wanted to sell them on the black market or something.'

'That's probably occurred to them,' Harry said, 'but you know Dumbledore. He'll never just take that for granted.'

'You're probably right,' she agreed. 'Still, nothing we can do about it, is there? Let's stay focused on what we can control. What were you looking for?'

'A cheat guide,' said Harry, pulling the potions book out of a pocket inside of his robes – the one he usually kept his invisibility cloak in.

'Is that what I think it is?' she asked, narrowing her eyes inquisitively.

'If you're thinking it's Snapes old potions textbook, then yes,' said Harry. 'There's a lot of useful stuff in here; I reckon if anything can help us brew an impossibly complex potion, this is it.'

'Ironic it would be so useful, when the man himself is such a pants teacher,' Ginny said dryly. 'All right, I admit this is a good plan. You could have told me what you were after before running off, though. You didn't need to be all dramatic.'

'That's what makes it fun!' Harry defended himself. 'I didn't think I'd be gone so long; sorry about that. Do you really think Time Turners have anything to do with why we're here?'

'Not really, no,' said Ginny, shrugging and glancing at the book she'd been reading. 'But it's something we haven't looked into heavily.'

'Couldn't hurt, I suppose. Not like we have any other good ideas. Now what say we get cracking on this potion?'

'I've been ready all evening,' said Ginny. 'Open that thing up and let's see what "The Prince" has to say."

Harry opened the familiar old textbook, covered just as he remembered on every margin on hearly every page with what had to be miles of teenage Snape's cramped, hasty scrawl. The potion they were looking for would be in here, he know; it had been removed from the newer editions of the book, but as Snape's had belonged to his mother and was several decades old…

'Here it is,' he said triumphantly. As he had hoped, the page was covered with notes and minor alterations to the instructions. 'Aletheialixer.'

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

~O~O~O~O~O~O~O~

Perhaps now you see what I meant about being uncomfortable with parts of this chapter. Still, I feel it was important to their character arcs as it's definitely something that would come up and they would have to deal with. I kind of handwaved and sugarcoated it a lot, but it was necessary for my own peace of mind. If what's left is a little less than what I was initially going for, I can live with that.

Please leave a review with your thoughts; I love reading them.