Launching Ships, Chapter 8

Both of the boys stared at him, their mouths falling open. "What?!"

"Are you saying-"

"That ickle Harrikins-"

"Will have to fight Voldie-"

"Or die in the process?"

Severus nodded, heavily.

"And no one was going to tell him?"

"I do not know if and when Professor Dumbledore was going to do so; he is rather fixated on 'allowing Potter to be a child', for what that's worth. And no, before you ask, you can't tell him. The Dark Lord has access to his mind, and his occlumency shields are pitiful at best."

The twins looked somewhat disgruntled and angry at that, but they were (thankfully) intelligent enough to understand, and while they tended to break school rules, Severus did not believe that they would willfully put their adopted brother in more danger than he was already in. He hoped.

"Wait. Voldemort-" Severus hissed as pain like boiling acid surged up his arm from where his mark was, and Fred, seeming to realize his pain, hastily amended "Um, Snakeface can read his mind?"

Severus gave a breathy little laugh at the epithet, and nodded. He was not going to tell the boys his suspicions, that the link was something more sinister than just a link, (they did not need to know about the darkest of magics) but he had to explain somehow. "When the Dark Lord attacked him, the residue of the curse and the backlash of the caster's magic formed an involuntary bond, at least, that is the best guess I can make." It was a sort of a bond in some twisted way, to be fair. "Since no one else has ever survived the killing curse, I cannot say for certain."

The boys seemed a little sceptical, but they appeared to at least accept what he had said, for now, and Severus moved on. "In any case, much as it may infuriate the boy-" he very carefully did not say brat for the Weasleys' sake- "he cannot be told anything incredibly sensitive for fear that the Dark Lord will just rip it out of his sleeping mind."

Fred and George slowly began to nod. "But if he isn't going to be told, how is he going to fulfill the thing? And how is it possible to kill him, anyway, if he can just pop right back from the dead like he did before?"

Damn, those boys were too intelligent for their own good!

"There are several...artifacts, for lack of a better word, that are keeping him from dying. Professor Dumbledore is researching them at this moment, and hopefully we will soon know how many there are and where they are." Dear Merlin, was he actually confiding in a couple of Gryffindor seventh years?

"Wait, so there are things that are keeping him from dying and we don't even know what they are? And what on earth can do that, anyway? It would have to be extremely dark magic." That was George.

"They- they are." Severus could not entirely conceal his stutter. "I beg that you restrain your natural curiosity, because it is...very, very dark. I do not...you do not need to know about such things yet."

The Weasleys nodded, although Severus sensed with a twinge of unease that they had not entirely let it go. Merlin, he hoped that the glorious imbeciles would not try to figure out what horcruxes were on their own...

"In any case, there are several artifacts, as well as, I believe, the Dark Lord's familiar, which are pinning him to life. Which brings me to another of my...problems. The snake has to go, but I cannot be seen killing her, and I doubt that she will take bait."

"Can you just spell it into her, like Poppy does?"

"No. That would...not have pleasant effects. That in itself would not be a problem, but the fact remains that if she dies of anything other than 'natural causes', the Dark Lord will be angry, and he will likely pressure the Inner Circle until he finds that I am a traitor, or even just suspects that I am, and then it is all over."

"Yeah, I can see that." Fred frowned. "Hmm. There has to be a way to do this..." he stopped and thought for an almost painfully long moment, before suddenly straightening, eyes brightening. "Wait. Forge, do you remember when Errol got strixalvus blight?"

"What does that have to do with Voldie's big-ass snake?"

"Language, Weasley," Severus muttered, but he was listening in bemusement too. What did a sickness that caused constipation in owl familiars have to do with Nagini?

"Well, we took him to Hagrid, and he was too sick to ingest the potion. Um, Professor Snape, can it be injected?"

Severus had to think for a moment, as the potion for curing strixalvus was not something that he had memorized like most human healing potions. "No, I don't believe so. As a matter of fact, it would cause cancerous lesions at the injection site, from what I have heard."

"Hmm." Fred was looking even more excited, reminding Severus of how he had always looked when he had just been given a particularly difficult potion to brew. "I know Hagrid must have gotten it into him somehow, and since he was vomiting up everything we tried to feed him, it couldn't be oral. And it couldn't exactly have been given to him the other way, either."

"Indeed." At this point Severus was quite intrigued, too. "I shall go talk to him, then."

"Can we go? As in, not with you; I bet it would damage your reputation to no end to be seen with us, but I mean, maybe we could just act curious about our owl? Hagrid might tell us things that are related with fewer reservations because he likes to chat and we like to listen. We might get a few more ideas."

"I- oh, very well." Severus admittedly did not like foisting things that he had off on his students, (strictly because the students wouldn't do a job that was up to his standards, not because he wasn't an opportunist) but the twins had volunteered, and Severus did want to avoid having to be polite to the talkative half-giant unless absolutely necessary, not least because Hagrid had, from the moment he had arrived at Hogwarts as a teeny firstie, taken to mothering him and pressing rock cakes on him due to some sort of imagined kinship or something that Severus had never quite figured out.

The twins worked quicker than he had expected. The very next day, in the middle of Potions, George's cauldron abruptly started to shake, and, upon examination, Severus discovered that the potion within had turned pink, was shooting up clouds of harmless sparkles, and was making an absolutely appalling noise that might possibly have been construed to be singing. Severus could scarcely hide his eye roll, even if he was a little impressed at the result.

"DETENTION, Weasley and Weasley!" he barked, vanishing the offending liquid. "Twenty points from Gryffindor and see me on your lunch break!"

Both boys gave him the customary frustrated and disappointed face, but it would have been more effective had they not just high-fived behind their backs at the same time. Severus turned away to hide his smile, with a hiss of "Now that Messrs. Weasley have forgone their shenanigans, we may continue with our lesson. As you can see, adding the salamander wool..."

The class at last crawled to a close, and Severus settled in to mark papers (something that he had been rather unavoidably neglecting) until it was lunchtime and the twin terrors could invade his classroom and share the knowledge that they had acquired. Ten minutes in, he heard a knock.

"What?!" Dear Merlin, what now?

"Knock knock, who's there," called two voices in a perfect chorus. Severus yanked open the door.

"Never in my life have a seen two Gryffindors so eager to scrub out spare cauldrons," he commented with his usual sneer, in case anyone was watching. Yes, even the portraits; he was not a spy for nothing.

"We had-"

"A question about the test-"

"And we figured we-"

"Might as well get it answered-"

"Early so that we could just-"

"Do our detention after that," said the twins, using their customary twinspeak, evidently also as a blind, since they rarely spoke that way in private.

"Well, get in then," Severus said, still in his harsh persona. "You will just be scrubbing cauldrons for two hours, then, and if there is any time afterwards I will help you with whatever you want."

He received identical pouts, but the twins entered his office readily enough. As soon as the door had clicked shut behind them, the jokesters straightened.

"Right sir," Fred (was that Fred? Severus could usually tell them apart because Fred was more forward and dressed less neatly, but they were both a mess today, and the other boy's extra-mussed red hair was covering the small strawberry birthmark that was his little tell, which made Severus ever so grateful that he could just call them both 'Mr Weasley') said, his face unusually serious. "Um, are we actually cleaning cauldrons first today?"

Severus barked a faint laugh. "Not if you can tell me what in Merlin's name you did to that innocent potion and how you did it. I do not believe that I could recreate it given the ingredients at hand."

Fred (it was definitely Fred; Severus had just caught sight of George's birthmark) flushed a little. "So, um, we used the blood replenisher base, since it was pink, but to make it darker we added a few extra drops of hibiscus essence, and then this chucklehead-"

"Hey!"

"-added some extra pixie wings, which interacted with the hemlock to make the entire thing exude that misty stuff; it stings your eyes and now I can taste chocolate in the back of my mouth, but I'm not sure if anything more serious is going to happen. Anyway, I...um...I added a cultured songfruit and a fwooper feather and, um...and then it started humming the My Little Pony theme song."

"The what?" Severus asked, puzzled, and then shook his head before the boy could answer. "Never mind. I don't want to know. I just never want to hear that atrocious sound again." Then the rest of what the boy had said caught up to him, and Severus sat bolt upright. "Songfruit?! Where in Merlin's name did you get ahold of that?" Songfruit was, while not poisonous, a highly addictive magical Somalian fruit somewhat similar to a quince, except that it made whoever swallowed it burst into inexhaustible and perfect music, and, in addition, tasted like pure sunshine, not that Severus had ever had a chance to taste it. Due to the fact that it could only be grown in that region, that it was endangered, and that it was almost as addictive as class seven nepenthe or crystalized magic, the Somalian magical government had restricted access to it, and the British Ministry had actually made it entirely illegal for anyone except a Potions or Herbology Master to possess. So how did two teenage boys (albeit inventive and mischievous ones) get ahold of it? And for Merlin's sake, why had they used it to ruin a perfectly good blood replenisher, of all the possible applications and uses it could have been put to?!

Fred mumbled something that Severus could not hear.

"The what?" he asked, his voice beginning to edge back into his 'Angry Professor' facade of old, dark and silky and dangerous. For all the boys pretended it didn't bother them, they began to edge back just a little.

"I...um...that is to say we...well, we might have gotten them from Mundungus Fletcher."

Severus raised an eyebrow. "Oh? And how did you get him to part with them? If I know that man, he would still try to gouge you even if he was too drunk to stand; he has done that actually."

"Funny story, that," said Fred nervously. "So, I was actually bargaining with him for a nice griffin claw, but he spilled that he had songfruit. I mean, I wanted it, you know, but I didn't really have enough, and plus, we have rent to pay on our store now. But anyway, I had just given him an obscene bunch of galleons for the griffin claw and when he finally handed it over, it was fake. I was mad with a capital M. I mean, he said that it was a mistake, and he had gotten it from the dealer, but it was pretty clear that he was lying. And I was really mad. So I went back and said, 'give us an actual griffon claw or give us our money back', but he had already pocketed it and then spent it on alcohol, and he didn't have a real griffon claw. So then I said that I would just take a songfruit in exchange then. He refused; I kinda don't blame him for that one, but I was still really angry, so I told him that he could either give me the money or cough up a songfruit. If he didn't do either, then I would turn him in to the aurors for possessing illegal potions ingredients. He said he would just make them disappear, and so I told him, 'fine then, I'll tell Dumbledore and Harry and the Ministry and the goblins that you were stealing and profiting off of items stolen from the Noble House of Black', and then I guaranteed that he'd catch it from three of them. And then George told him that if that didn't work, we'd prank the daylights out of him." Fred was beginning to grow more confident with the progression of his tale. "So finally the old fraud handed over the case of songfruit, and we've been experimenting ever since. We discovered since fwoopers are associated with bad music and songfruit are associated with good music the two would make a muffled, slightly out-of-tune song when mixed in a potion together, so that's that."

Severus blinked. And then he stared, totally derailed. "Fifty points to Gryffindor for Slytherin thinking," he said at last, and, while the twins were still gaping "and forty points from Gryffindor for possession of restricted ingredients and frivolous use of them. Now, after that most delightful detour, what did you come here to tell me, and why was it so important that you had to skive off your last class?" He couldn't help the second point deduction, although it was emanating just as much from bitterness as from a desire to discipline the two troublemakers. He would have loved to have songfruit to play with, and they wasted it like that?!

"Well, for one, we learned how Hagrid spelled the potion into Errol."

One black eyebrow swooped up; Severus was interested in spite of himself. "Oh?"

"There's no human spell that can do it, but that isn't to say that their aren't nonhuman spells," George said, beginning to explain. "He just called Lolly, and she transferred it right to his stomach, no problem, no questions asked. House elf magic is on a completely different wavelength."

"On a completely different spectrum, you mean; house elf magic is literally so far from human that the two magics repulse each other, except when a house elf and a family are forming a bond. That's why house elf magic works on and around humans but human magic hurts them; human magic is too strong and too foreign to them," Fred interjected. "I talked to Misty about magical theory. But anyway, the point is that there is a way."

Severus forgot to breath for a second, but quickly recovered himself enough to ask:"A way to safely and undetectably spell poison into the snake?"

"Yeah."

It was only because Severus was too dignified to punch the air like a firstie when his Quidditch team won that he remained in his seat. One horcrux down, then. At least three more to go, although Severus suspected there were more from the way Dumbledore was acting, and he also (in the darkest of night, when all his barriers were down) worried that that bond that was in Potter was more than a bond. He had felt it from inside the brat's mind, after all, and it did not feel like any bond he had ever seen, felt, or even heard about. It was too intimate; it was clear that the Dark Lord could break into his mind even when (though rarely) he had his occlumency shields up full bore. It literally allowed the boy to speak parseltongue, and to break into the Dark Lord's mind even when He was occluding. That was no garden variety magical tie, not in the least.

But he had been researching it, and has found a spell which would tell him soul-status, so hopefully, if he got a chance to cast it on the brat, he could figure out if his horrific fears were even close to being justified. As for the rest of the artifacts, he hoped, perhaps, to enlist the goblins, seeing as Albus kept everything close to the chest.

"Good," he replied at last. "Was there anything else you needed?"

"A pass to the Restricted Section," Fred replied calmly. There's a prank we want to try on Charlie, but I think the book it was in was removed from the main section due to it...um...being inappropriate."

Severus blinked. "And you expect me to help you why?" Something here wasn't quite right; if the mayhem-makers just wanted an indecent spellbook, they could owl-order it under an assumed name- and they did have enough gold to do so if they could afford to throw it away in Fletcher's overpriced wares.

"We have songfruit?"

Severus stifled a groan that he would likely never admit to. Those damn boys always knew all the different ways to pull his strings like a marionette, for good or for ill. He pressed down the distant, troubling sense of foreboding- the twins in the Restricted Section was not a pleasant thought, and huffed a long sigh. It likely wouldn't be too bad; Merlin only knew they'd been let into the place many times before without it ending up in flames or as rubble...and, for the first time in his life (and very much against his better judgement) he summoned one of the pink paper slips. "V-very well," he said, unable to stifle the slightest of quavers which has cropped up in his voice. "I will take you up on your offer. Don't abuse the privilege, though, and consider yourself fortunate that I did not merely deny it and confiscate the fruit."

"We promise," the two chorused. Severus could not help hiding a flicker of unease, even as the two of them gratefully accepted the slips.

"Thank you sir."

"We won't, sir,"

The two troublemakers gave him the box in a hurry, then made a little more small talk before at last heading for the Great Hall for lunch. It was just at that moment that Severus realized that the pretended detention hadn't actually even happened. The bloody Gryffindors had distracted him!