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lomonaaerenTitle: Deep in the Drowning Green
Pairing Harry/Snape
Rating: R
Warnings: Profanity, violence, sex, ambiguous ending. Assumes that Snape survived DH.
Word count: ~37,000
Summary: The hunt for Bellatrix’s Horcrux will take Harry and Snape into another dimension, into a confrontation with a legendary monster, and into conflict and collision with each other.
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.
Author's Note: This was written forcluegirl in the 2010 hds_beltane fest, but not posted elsewhere until now. Many thanks to my beta, who went above and beyond the call of duty.
Deep in the Drowning Green
Harry didn’t believe the rumors. Anyone could spread a rumor.
He didn’t believe the immediate conclusion that the Ministry tried to jump to for the first killing. As he knew to his disgust, particularly since the war, anyone could kill.
He didn’t believe the stammering witness who was paraded before the Wizengamot to try to persuade them to justify extreme force. Anyone could stammer and blush and pale and even faint, if that was necessary. Harry had seen more tricks from witnesses in three months of being an Auror than he had expected to see in a lifetime.
When he saw her for himself, he began to believe.
*
Harry had chosen a house on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. When the doors of Hogwarts had closed behind him for the last time, he found that he wasn’t in such a hurry to leave after all. True, the school held some of his most horrible memories, but also some of his best. It was a place of the past.
Harry was sick of trying to leave the past behind.
True, he was away most of the day, and often a good portion of the night, during Auror training, and his schedule was only worse since he had become a full Auror. But he still got to spend a lot of time at the house, sometimes even entire weekends, and he had found that he liked looking at a garden that was his own and tending the small flowers that were all he grew in it and looking over its stone walls towards the walls of Hogwarts.
He slept in a bedroom that overlooked the garden. It had wood-paneled walls and reminded Harry both greatly and not at all of the cupboard. He was fond of it, and of the thick scratchy blankets that draped the foot of the bed, a present from Hermione, and of the Chudley Cannons poster that hung on the wall, a gift from Ron. He leaned the new Firebolt he’d bought for Quidditch the summer after the war against the door and considered the place the most comfortable room in the house.
The Killing Curse came through the window. Only the way Harry had arranged the bed meant it went over his head instead of into it. At least his training had been thorough enough to make him snatch his wand up a moment later and roll off the bed and then underneath it, listening intently for breathing all the while.
It was there. Laughter like a ghost’s laugh. Thick, creaking footsteps, that made Harry think at first, with the dreams still clinging in shreds and tatters to his mind, that an enormous puppet was coming after him. A sharp face that poked into his window, rising as if fearless, staring into the shadows.
Searching for him.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
Harry took a deep breath, put aside all the jabber in his brain about how she was dead, and flung himself out from under the bed. There was no way to disguise his rush. He didn’t try. He just rose up in front of the window and used the extra-powerful Blasting Curse that his trainers had told him over and over again not to use, trying his best just to kill her, kill her and have done with it.
He hit her. She flew the length of the garden and hit the wall. There was a noise like a mousetrap going off. Harry rose up with his hand on the windowsill, half-kneeling, ready to duck again if she picked herself up again.
She picked herself up again.
This time, Harry could see the source of the creaking and the puppet-like noise. She moved with the shuffling, limping gait of someone on strings, and when she opened her mouth, she produced the ghost-laughter he had heard before. She could be hurt, and Harry suspected she was carrying a lot of wounds around in her body that hadn’t healed or barely healed.
But she couldn’t die.
"You can’t kill me, baby," she said. "Small chance that you’d manage. You’re too little." And she chanted some spell he’d never heard before but which made his elbow joints explode in pure white-hot fire.
Unfortunately for Bellatrix, Harry had a high pain tolerance. It made his trainers shake their heads--and Hermione, sometimes--but it saved his life now. He ignored the spell and managed to lift his wand arm anyway, calling out the incantation that would wrap her up in a magic-proof cage. If he couldn’t kill her, he would capture her and let the Ministry deal with her.
But she was gone before he finished the first syllable. Harry smiled grimly. She’d learned some caution, then.
He leaned his head on the windowsill and whimpered a little, because his elbows really hurt. Then he stood up and went to report the attack.
And ask for healing from St. Mungo’s. That was important, too.
*
"So she’s really hunting you." Ron said it emptily, like an echo in a tomb, and put down his teacup so hard on the edge of the table Harry thought it would crack. Then he put his hands over his face and dragged them slowly down, breathing so rapidly that Harry winced. "Fuck."
"Yeah." Harry stared into his own teacup and wondered if they should be discussing this in the middle of their office. Then he shook his head. The rumors of Bellatrix’s return were already everywhere, and he thought she was probably too mad to have allies in the Ministry who would report their words to her.
Besides, she already knows she attacked me, he thought, touching his elbow with the flat of his hand. And so do I.
"How did she survive?" Ron tilted back and asked the question of the ceiling.
Harry swallowed. "I have a theory." It was one Ron wouldn’t like. Ron sometimes seemed to have decided that a large part of their experiences during the war were a dream. Harry had mentioned the Sword of Gryffindor the other day, and Ron had shaken his head in wonder and asked what made him think of that. Harry spoke these words while keeping a cautious eye on Ron, ready to back away if he came too close to an old wound.
Ron looked at him, the flat expression on his face speaking his guess.
"A Horcrux," Harry said. "We know that your mum hit her with the Killing Curse, just like I hit Voldemort with the reflected Killing Curse when I was a baby. And she looked inhuman. Voldemort was a monster, too, by the time he came back from death."
"She didn’t look like the same kind of monster, you said." Ron turned away to rearrange the paperwork on his desk, and his turned back was like a shut door. No, Harry thought in hopelessness, eyeing him, a shut door would have more tendency to open. "Surely that indicates that she survived by some other method."
"We don’t know everything about Horcruxes," Harry said. "But what we do know suggests that it’s the only way to survive a Killing Curse." He smiled, though he had the impression that his smile had the same desperation as the painted expression on a clown’s face, and tried to lighten the mood. "Unless you’re suggesting that someone loved Bellatrix enough to make a sacrifice of love for her the way my mum did for me."
"I don’t want to joke about this," Ron said, and Harry winced and shut up for a long moment when he heard his voice.
"Sorry," Harry said at last. "But I do think that a Horcrux is our best guess. We never did find all the collection of Dark artifacts and Dark Arts books that Bellatrix and her husband were supposed to have gathered. And at least one of the missing books had information about how to make Horcruxes in it."
Ron turned around and stared at him this time. "How do you know that?"
"I kept track of it," Harry said, meeting Ron’s eyes and wishing he knew why his palms were clammy and his forehead hot. After all, it wasn’t as though Ron was the only one who would have liked to forget the war, or the only one who had dangerous knowledge about Horcruxes. "I thought--well, I reckon I never trusted that all the knowledge of how to make them would have died with Voldemort."
"It didn’t," Ron muttered, and lowered his head onto his folded arms. "It survives in us."
"I know," Harry said quietly. "But right now, we need to find out if that’s what she’s using, and then where it is and how to destroy it if that’s true."
Ron sat with his head down for a few more minutes. He was taking deep, long breaths that made him sound as if he had a broken bone. But Harry sat still and left him alone, because he knew the signs. Ron was getting ready to take on a big task that he really hated. This was the way he’d acted before he went down to the holding cells to question a Dark wizard who’d murdered seven women by cutting them all into thirds, and he’d eventually got the answers that sealed the case.
Ron finally raised his head, and said, "Sorry, mate. If you were thinking that it would come up again someday, I just hoped that we were all done with it."
Harry nodded his acceptance. "So where do we begin?"
*
He should have anticipated Ron’s answer to that question, Harry thought later, looking around at the neatly stacked, leather-smelling shelves of the Weasley-Granger library. For Ron, still, most questions began and ended with Hermione.
"She could have a Horcrux," Hermione said doubtfully, blowing dust away from a page she was examining. "Grilius, in 769, said that sometimes Horcruxes brought back bodies that had the remnants of old injuries in them." She turned the page, and her voice had a trace of the eager, chill threat Harry imagined in the voice of a pack of hounds hunting down prey. "In fact, apparently that’s the way Horcruxes normally function."
"Normally?" Harry asked, thinking of Voldemort and trying to put the word Hermione had just spoken into that context.
Hermione shot him a sharp look. "I meant, when someone only has one of them. Not seven, the way Voldemort had."
Harry nodded again. Now he was examining the windows of the library and the wards that crackled behind them. Hermione took the safety of her books seriously. Still, he wondered if the wards would hold up should Bellatrix take it into her head to attack here.
And she might very well. Voldemort’s madness had at least been purposeful, and the connection Harry had to him through the scar had made him feel as though he had some level of control over his enemy’s actions, illusory as that was. Harry did not think he understood anything of the jagged, broken-pattern way in which Bellatrix’s mind worked.
"How are we going to find the Horcrux?" he asked, thinking of that. "The Horcrux could be anything. It could be hidden anywhere. Bellatrix could tell us straight out what and where it was and we probably wouldn’t understand her." He clenched his fists in his lap and swore softly, thinking about it.
"Well, we aren’t going to get anywhere by acting as though we’ll lose before we begin the battle," Hermione said, in the heavy tone that was meant to weigh down Harry’s emotions like a paperweight so he could consider them calmly. "For the moment, we’ll assume that Bellatrix’s Horcrux is a Dark artifact. She learned the idea from Voldemort. Wouldn’t she have wanted to imitate him in every way possible? That means she would choose powerful magical objects, perhaps from the Founders. There are a limited number of those."
Harry took a deep breath, feeling as though he were surfacing from far beneath the water. "You’re right, of course, Hermione," he said. "Do you think we ought to make sure we know where the Sword of Gryffindor is?"
Hermione gave him a faint smile. "I don’t think she would have had a chance to make a Horcrux of that," she said soothingly. "We had it too much of the time, and we would have noticed a change in it." Harry opened his mouth to dispute that, but Hermione held up a hand, and Harry subsided into grumbling silence. "We would have," Hermione said. "But we know that she had access to Hogwarts during that year when Snape was Headmaster, if she wanted it. That means we should check--oh, perhaps the Sorting Hat, or other things around the school that might belong to the Founders. I know there are objects we never investigated and we didn’t know about at the time. I only learned of them years later." By now her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushing with the excitement of the hunt. "We’ll find it, Harry."
Harry relaxed. He would participate in the hunt, of course, because as much as he loved Hermione, he had lost his faith in her infallibility over the years. But it was good to be reminded that the search was not hopeless.
It was good to have friends.
*
After five hours in a dusty, musty, rusty vault deep in the Ministry that stored any artifacts reputed to have the most minor of connections with the Founders, Harry was beginning to reconsider his stance on hope.
They hadn’t found anything at Hogwarts. Though McGonagall, with an air of dubiousness that made Harry feel as if it were about to storm the entire time they were in her office, had let them examine the Sorting Hat, they found no sign of tampering with it. Nor was there a single artifact in Hogwarts that had a trace of the dark Horcrux magic. McGonagall had told them tartly that she rather thought the professors would have noticed by now; Harry had been obliged to confess what the Horcruxes were when he returned to finish his NEWTs on the pain of penetrating stares, and McGonagall had come up with spells that would supposedly detect the presence of their magic on school grounds after that. No, Bellatrix’s Horcrux was not hidden at Hogwarts.
Hermione had promptly suggested Gringotts, in the Lestrange vault, and they had spent at fortnight trying to negotiate with the goblins to see any ruins that might be left. The goblins were not impressed with their promise not to ransack the bank again. In the end, however, that produced nothing, either; apparently most of the contents of the Lestrange vault had turned to slag and dross during their escape with the dragon.
After that, it was the vault in the Ministry. The Department of Mysteries gathered mostly Dark artifacts and powerful ones, but they also, as Hermione lectured Harry in the lift all the way down, picked up things of legendary interest, under the pretense of keeping them safe for future generations who wanted to know the history of wizardkind. If the artifacts were only ornamental instead of useful, then the pretense became reality. There was an enormous collection of what were supposed to be Slytherin’s robes, Ravenclaw’s wands, Hufflepuff’s personal spellbooks, and Gryffindor’s chamberpots. As well as plenty of other things that made Harry feel historians must be mad.
He put aside yet another wand that McGonagall’s Horcrux-detecting spell had failed to work on, and sighed. Hermione was still head-deep in a box of books, occasionally grunting like a satisfied pig. Harry shook his head with a frown and sat back.
"Do you think we’ll find anything here?" he asked, when Hermione was only occupied with one book instead of a whole box and he thought it less likely she would start at the sound of his voice and topple over.
Hermione stared at him. "I’ve already discovered five spells that have been lost for centuries," she said.
"Yes," Harry said, "but do you think it’s likely Bellatrix’s Horcrux is here?"
Hermione seemed to recall herself and sat down on one of the boxes, which creaked. "No," she admitted reluctantly. "Even if they didn’t know what it was, the Department of Mysteries would probably have sensed the Dark magic in her Horcrux and made sure it was safely destroyed."
"Or kept somewhere," Harry muttered. Though he knew Unspeakables were supposed to destroy things that could be dangerous, his experience working with them during Auror training, let alone the time he’d been here during his fifth year, suggested that they had a stronger than normal fascination with shaking and poking things to see how they worked.
Hermione glanced at him repressively. "This, they would have destroyed," she said, and Harry had to nod.
Then Hermione drooped a bit. "But I don’t know any other source of Founder’s artifacts," she admitted. "We might have to research for months before we even learn what object she could have taken, let alone find it."
"And we don’t have months," Harry said, thinking of the attack Bellatrix had launched last night. Her victims hadn’t died. It might have been kinder if they had.
"I know," Hermione said. The weariness in her voice seemed to reach out and wrap around Harry like a dense, dusty smoke, choking off the slight hilarity that had been keeping him going so far. He stared at the floor between his feet and wondered what he was supposed to do. He was an Auror, but that didn’t mean he could protect people from Bellatrix. He had killed Voldemort and helped destroy the Horcruxes, but then, he’d had a lot of help from Dumbledore--at least some idea of what the Horcruxes were, if not where to look. What was he supposed to do this time?
"It would be so much simpler if she had imitated Voldemort," Hermione said. "But I don’t think she did."
Inspiration hit Harry with the force of sunlight. He sat up and said, "What if she did? But what if she didn’t use a Founder’s artifact?"
Hermione frowned at him. "You think she might have used some personal object, like the diary? But that doesn’t leave us any better off. We don’t know what might have mattered to Bellatrix when she was a child."
"What about a living creature?" Harry insisted. "Voldemort made a Horcrux out of Nagini, and Bellatrix would have been around Nagini a lot more than any of the other Horcruxes. Maybe that made some difference to her madness and she decided to make one based on her. It’s at least worth a try, isn’t it?"
Hermione gasped, her expression brightening. "Harry, you’re a genius," she said, thus ensuring that this memory would become one Harry often put in his Pensieve to relive. "Of course. We’ll still have to look for what she used, but at least we can look in the records that were taken from the places she lived during the war and see what creatures she was around!" She flung her arms around Harry and hugged him tight. "Thank you!"
Harry didn’t see what he’d done other than come up with an idea, but he understood after a moment of hugging Hermione back. He had given her a direction to start her research in, and for Hermione, there was no more valuable gift.
*
Harry woke groggily. It seemed to him he’d been having an interesting dream, where he walked through flowering meadows hand-in-hand with Ginny and everything was working out all right for them. It would have been great if that dream could have replaced the reality, where he and Ginny had realized sadly that they weren’t suited to each other and drifted apart. Waking up to something hovering at the foot of his bed was a distinct letdown from that.
The first thing he thought of was Bellatrix, or at least the ghost of one of her victims, and he grabbed his wand. The thing didn’t cackle, though, and when Harry cast Lumos on his wand, he saw it was an owl.
The owl landed on the bed, and Harry eyed it for a minute before he reached out and took the letter from it. It was battered-looking and disreputable. It had black feathers with glimpses of gold underneath them when it shifted, as though it had robbed a dragon’s hoard. Its beak appeared to have been put on its face by someone with no notion of what a beak should look like; it was sharp, pale, and resembled dried ivory. It had heavy, jagged talons with claws Harry could swear looked like iron.
It didn’t bite him or tear his beating heart from his chest, though, which Harry decided would have to be good enough for right now. He opened the letter, reading it with one eye while he kept the other eye on the owl.
Potter, said the letter, in writing as jagged as the owl’s beak, you will never find Bellatrix’s Horcrux with the clumsy efforts you have made so far. She has hidden it in another place, sideways from the world. The only way you can find and kill it is to go to that place, which is not simple to find.
Harry narrowed his eyes. The letter was unsigned, the handwriting familiar enough to stir a faint memory but no more than that. Who in the world could know about Bellatrix’s Horcrux? Harry turned the letter over, seeking for a clue, but it was only one sheet of thin parchment, without a marking on the other side.
The clumsy owl beat its wings with a sound like ringing bells and lifted into the air, hovering for a moment in a way that made it saw back and forth. Then it landed on Harry’s shoulder and drove its claws into his flesh.
"Ouch!" hissed Harry, rearing back and holding up his wand at the awkward angle necessary to deal with a threat so close. He was going to hex the owl’s head off before it took a fancy to his ear.
The owl opened its mouth, and arctic breath streamed over Harry. He thought he heard it say something, a single word, before the familiar pull of a Portkey seized him.
Harry went cursing, and not only because he had never heard of anyone making an owl into a Portkey. The word had been familiar, in a voice that at least played the right chords in his memory.
"Imbecile," the voice had said.
It was Snape’s.
*
Harry landed with a bump on something relatively soft, with a sense of largeness around him that told him he was outside. He scrambled up and around in a circle, wand aimed at--whatever he needed to aim it at.
There was no one in sight. Harry was, so far as he could see in the pitiful light his Lumos Charm cast, standing on an expanse of scrubby, short grass next to a large lake. There was a crooked shape in the distance on the lakeshore that might be a tree. To the left of him was a tiny house as patched-together and ramshackle as the owl.
Said horrid bird lifted from his shoulder and flapped heavily towards it. Harry stared at the house and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did, except that the door of the house opened to let the owl in. Then it closed, and silence lapped around Harry like the water on the edge of the lake.
Harry made the Lumos brighter still and held up the wand, turning in a slow circle. No matter where or how far he looked, the country remained essentially featureless. The single tree beside the lake was the only one Harry could see, and the way its dark branches curled back on themselves suggested that it wasn’t the healthiest plant that had ever lived. The grass stretched out in a broad, flat plain. No walls, no other dwellings but the house, no hills. Harry sniffed and thought there was a faint, alien taste to the air, tart, like lemons, but it faded before he could be certain.
Or did I get used to it?
Harry glanced uneasily at the lake. It had a wavy bank rather than a curved one, and it was big enough that it was hard to see the far side.
Of course, the darkness probably doesn’t help with that, Harry thought, and edged forwards. He wondered if the lake contained a monster, the way the one at Hogwarts contained the squid, and what he would do if it did.
The whole time, a persistent beating in the back of his head told him to go into the house. Harry ignored it. He half-suspected what he would find waiting for him there, and he didn’t want to face it.
Something caught him across the shins. Harry stumbled and rolled immediately to his knees, wand up to blast it.
No monster, from the lake or otherwise, met his eyes. Instead, Harry saw, he had tripped over a carved stone, with scratches in its surface that obviously weren’t natural. Harry bent down and studied them.
Most of them, he couldn’t make sense of, and he didn’t know if that was because of their awkward shape, the extreme age of the carving, or something else. But he did puzzle out two words that made his fingers curl hard into the dirt.
Godric Gryffindor.
Harry swallowed. What is this place?
"Potter. Stop crawling through the dirt and come inside like an adult wizard." The voice paused, then added, "If you have merely grown taller instead of more intelligent, then feel free to ignore that invitation."
The voice was the same as the one that had come out of the owl’s beak. Harry stood up, still keeping his eyes on the stone until the moment when he had to turn around and face Snape, for his self-respect if nothing else.
Snape had sallow skin still. He had a jagged nose that looked as if he used it to peck eyes out--though Harry had to admit that it wasn’t as ugly as the beak of the owl sitting on his shoulder. He had a long series of parallel scratches down the side of his throat, which Harry guessed must be the mark of Nagini’s fangs. If anything was unexpected, it was only the interest in the dark eyes that fastened on Harry, and the fact that he seemed to have found a potion that rendered his hair even more like the strings of a mop.
Harry wanted to say something like, But you’re dead! That couldn’t be true, though, not if Snape was standing in front of him. He had tried to get beyond stating the obvious in the past few years. So he gripped his wand and said nothing.
"Tell me, Potter," Snape continued, pacing forwards with slow, stately steps that nonetheless made the owl on his shoulder jog back and forth until it tightened its grip, "are all Aurors as poorly trained as you? Or would anyone in the Auror Department have fallen victim to a Portkey as simple as the one I used on you?"
Harry clenched his jaw until he thought he could feel one of his teeth crack. He wanted to say there was nothing simple about turning an owl into a Portkey, and that anyone else would have fallen victim to the same trick. He wanted to say that it would have made a lot more sense for Snape to just send him the information about Bellatrix’s Horcrux, if he had it, in the letter instead of bringing him here. He wanted to say--
Oh, all sorts of things.
In the end, he relaxed his jaw long enough to say, "What did you want from me, Snape?" He was proud of himself. His voice was as bland and rough as the grass under their feet.
Snape stopped walking closer and studied him like a Potions ingredient that wasn’t as dead as he’d thought it was. Harry did nothing, said nothing, just gripped his wand and stared back.
Then Snape said, in the most pleasant tone Harry had ever heard him use--because it was the most neutral--"Come inside," and turned back to the cottage.
Harry followed him, because it would look childish not to. Then he caught the thoughts he was using and snorted.
This is Snape. Whoever invented the term "childish grudge" probably foresaw his existence and invented it especially for him. Why do you worry what he thinks of you?
Harry flipped one shoulder up in a quick shrug, even though there was no one to see it. Well, he cared what he thought of himself. And the more he irritated Snape, the longer the man would probably keep whatever information he had to himself, and the more of Harry’s time he would waste.
It was as good a rationale as any for ducking inside the cottage behind Snape and looking around.
Harry’s first impression was that he didn’t want to sneeze in here. Every shelf, every box on the floor, every table, was crowded with glass vials or cauldrons, most of them filled to the brim with disgusting liquids. (Well, Harry didn’t know they were disgusting, but they had enough thickness and odd combinations of colors to look like it). The only clear area was around the largest cauldron in the center of the room, which made grumbling sloppy sounds to itself. Harry looked a second time, but didn’t see another door. He wondered where Snape slept and used the loo, and then decided that he didn’t absolutely need that knowledge and so would disregard his curiosity.
Snape turned around to face him. In the dim light from a fireplace that flickered invisibly behind a table, the scars from Nagini’s bite looked even worse. Harry studied him in silence and decided that he wouldn’t ask how Snape had survived. Probably some combination of Potions knowledge and sheer bloody refusal to die.
"Why did you contact me?" he asked.
Snape curled his lip. "Why, Potter, I should think that would be obvious," he said. "I am giving you another chance to be a hero. You do so enjoy it, and my world is marginally more pleasant when I see you acting competent."
Harry gripped his hands together behind his back and wondered if Snape wanted him to yell. Probably. That way, he could feel superior.
What he couldn’t have any way of knowing--wherever Snape had been for the last four years, Harry doubted it was in regular contact with the wizarding world--was that the Head Auror had insisted that Harry work on managing his temper. He still lost it when someone committed a murder or bragged about committing one in front of him, or when Ron got drunk and wouldn’t leave certain embarrassing memories alone, but it would take a lot more than a few insults to make him shout now.
Which doesn’t prevent me from filing down my teeth with the grinding, Harry thought, and said, "Fine. But what do you get out of it?"
Snape paused, studying him again. Harry had no idea what he hoped to see in Harry’s face this time, and tried to maintain the bland stare back.
Snape turned away at last, and said, "This place is sideways from the real world, a pocket of dead history that the Dark Lord discovered, investigated, and decided held no further use. It has a use for me. I can find the Potions ingredients I need here, and conduct my brewing in peace. But Bellatrix has hidden her Horcrux here." Harry was impressed. The malice Snape used to form those words outweighed even the sort he’d shown Harry when he was screaming that he was the Half-Blood Prince. "Its presence disturbs me. I wish to destroy it and regain my solitude."
Harry waited for something more and repeated, "Fine. But why can’t you destroy it yourself?" He ran his eyes over the ranks of potions again. "I imagine you’re fully capable."
Snape gave him yet another odd look. Harry hoped he would find something else to do soon. The stay in this place, wherever it was, would get boring if that was Snape’s only occupation.
"My potions have no effects on the Horcrux," Snape said, when he had gathered whatever information his silent stare from Harry seemed intended to gather and turned his eyes away again. He put a hand on a stirring rod in the middle of the cauldron and moved it idly back and forth. "Neither do my spells. The only spell that might, Fiendfyre, does not function in this universe, where it was never discovered. But I have managed to damage its defenses. I am not weak, though I have come near to dying." He touched the side of his throat. Harry wondered if he knew he was doing it; it looked like a habitual gesture. "You are someone who has strength of your own." He glared at Harry this time, which was a bit more comforting because it was more familiar. "Together, we may be able to destroy it."
"Right," Harry said. He wanted to ask lots of questions, but he doubted that Snape would answer him even now, and he didn’t feel like wasting his breath or hearing any more insults. "Then let me go back to the Auror Department and find spellbooks about ancient spells that might work, or ask Hermione--"
"That was a one-way Portkey I used," Snape said. "To travel between the dimensions is exhausting and perilous. You will not be returning until the creature is destroyed."
"Really." Harry couldn’t prevent the grinding from emerging in his voice this time. "And you couldn’t have bloody warned me before this happened? Or at least left me time to write a note? And where am I supposed to sleep?"
Snape looked down his nose at Harry. "To answer the least important question first, in the same place I do. This cottage does not hold enough room for more than that, and we do not dare sleep outside, for fear of encountering the Horcrux’s malignant effects."
"What?" Harry snapped, undone at the thought of sleeping in the same bed as Snape--or, more likely considering the amount of space in here, on the same pile of dirty, filthy rags. "You’ve got to be--"
"My owl can travel between the worlds with relative ease," Snape continued. "He is a made thing, a construct, as you may have noticed." He touched the iron talons of the owl, who still sat on his shoulder and watched Harry with what seemed an unrelenting hate. "You will communicate with your friends that way. And if I had warned you, you would have resisted. We do not have time for resistance."
"Does the Horcrux have a deadline it has to be destroyed by?" Harry asked, momentarily diverted.
"No," Snape said, looking honestly surprised for a moment. "I wish to have my peace back as soon as possible."
"Then what was that about--"
"I wish to have my peace back as soon as possible," Snape said, in the loud, long tones he used when he thought he was speaking to an imbecile, which meant it was the voice Harry had always remembered him by. "Your arguments would have made it take longer than it has to."
Harry rolled his eyes.
Snape didn’t appear to notice, instead nodding to a corner of the room that looked as if it was solid with Potions racks. "This way."
Harry followed, shaking his head. He was tired, he decided, and he wanted to get back to sleep. That was the only reason he didn’t ask more questions, didn’t demand that Snape send his owl with a letter to Hermione this instant.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was because he was already beginning to realize that he wouldn’t get any answers.
*
Pale sunlight woke Harry. He’d always had trouble sleeping with light shining on his face. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and yawned.
A clash of wings made him jump. When he looked over, Snape’s badly-made owl was glaring at him from the top of a shelf. It gave Harry a few more moments to contemplate how rude he was just for existing, then turned back to stare at Snape. Harry guessed it was watching over his sleep.
Not the kind of thing I’d choose to wake up to, Harry thought, and levered himself out of the pallet as quietly as possible. To his surprise, the thing had turned out to be a real bed, if on the floor and made from a mattress filled with old, crackling feathers. When he was looking at the cottage and estimating the dimensions, Harry had forgotten about wizardspace.
But sleeping next to Snape was still an unpleasant experience, Harry quickly corrected himself, as he wound his way carefully around the racks and shelves and cauldrons and major, central cauldron and out into the open to piss. (He didn’t want to imagine what Snape’s bathroom looked like). Snape grumbled. He kicked. Once he had hissed something right into Harry’s ear that had Harry waking up in a panic, grabbing his wand. And of course there was no chance of getting comfortably naked in any bed he was in. Harry just had to thank the fate that had led him to being so tired last evening that he’d collapsed into bed still in his robes. Otherwise, the owl probably would have brought him here without giving him time to dress.
Wherever "here" is.
Harry took another look around by daylight. There was still nothing interesting in sight. He would have expected to see some sign of mountains or hills in the distance, but there were none. The briskly cold air around him seemed to suggest he was still in England, or at least somewhere in the north, but the lack of farms, moors, a view of the ocean, and any other distinguishing features made it impossible to tell where.
Something Snape had said last night tugged at Harry’s memory.
He couldn’t use Fiendfyre because it hasn’t been invented here.
So this is a lost piece of history? Someplace where wizards didn’t invent certain spells? Or maybe never lived? No, that can’t be it, or we wouldn’t be able to use magic at all, and the Horcrux probably couldn’t exist.
Harry shuddered at what that thought implied. I could have lived my life quite happily never knowing that Horcruxes were some of the first magic to be invented.
He set out for a walk around the lake, wondering as he went when breakfast was and if he would be able to eat it. Since he didn’t have another goal, he started out for the withered black tree, which didn’t look any more attractive with the sun up, either. Lightning had probably struck it sometime in the past, Harry thought idly.
Then he stepped around it, and stared.
Something living was here after all.
The creature was a black horse, cropping the grass close to the edge of the lake with a determination that hinted it didn’t get to eat often. Its mane hung down its neck in knotted strands that suggested no one had been taking care of it. It scraped the grass with a hoof and then huffed, drawing its head back to stare down disapprovingly.
Harry couldn’t help it; he laughed.
The horse jerked its head up, staring at him. For a moment, its tail flicked and its flanks shuddered as though it were considering running. Then it went back to grazing, watching him with one suspicious eye in the meantime.
Harry came slowly closer. The horse watched him still, but didn’t attempt to run. It even let Harry step up to it and stroke its neck. It wasn’t tall, about as big as a Shetland pony, but its coat was smooth and short, like the grass, instead of shaggy. It leaned against him with a small sigh, abandoning its grazing to snort unexpectedly sweet breath into his face.
"Who do you belong to?" Harry asked it quietly. The horse cocked its head towards his voice, but with no sign of understanding. "Probably not Snape. I can’t blame you for avoiding him. He’d chop you up for Potions ingredients." The horse gave a little squeal, and Harry laughed again. "But you must be used to humans," he added, as the horse lifted its chin to be scratched, "with the way you’re reacting to me."
The horse closed its large dark eyes and gave no opinion one way or the other.
Harry looked it over carefully. If it could provide him any evidence of where it had come from, then he would try to find the wizards, or at least the people, who owned it. They could help him learn more about the life in this place, which Snape seemed to be disinclined to chat about.
He could see no marks on the horse that would indicate anyone had used a saddle or bridle to tame it, and its coat was covered with little bristles and snarls that Harry thought people groomed out (though he had to admit his knowledge about horses was hazy). Its mane was sharp and ragged, almost weedy, as though someone had cut it at one point and then the horse had run away before it could happen again.
"I wouldn’t blame you if that’s what you did," Harry told the horse, who blinked its eyes at him and blew on the front of his robes as it searched for treats in his pockets. "I hated having my hair cut when Aunt Petunia did it, too."
He walked around the horse, and it craned its neck back to watch him do it. There were no marks on the flanks, either. Harry looked at its tail, but it appeared normal. So no one had cut that lately.
He came back around to the front of the horse and stroked its nose again. "Sorry," he said, when it tried to nuzzle into his hand. "I don’t have any food for you."
The horse stepped back and pawed at the ground with its hoof. Harry thought it was trying to find better grass, but it looked at him expectantly, and then dropped to one knee.
Harry felt his mouth fall open. "Someone must have owned you, and trained you to do that," he said. He found himself looking carefully at it for signs of wings that he’d somehow missed. Maybe it had escaped from a flying horse farm, and that was why it was so far away from all signs of other wizards. But no, it didn’t have wings.
The horse looked appealingly up at him. Harry blinked. He knew that animals didn’t really feel human emotions--although some of the smuggled magical creatures he’d rescued during his time as an Auror came pretty bloody close--but he thought its eyes showed loneliness and yearning.
"Do you want to be ridden?" he asked.
The horse snorted, an enormous blast of warm air, and flicked its tail in agitation, but didn’t stand up or move nearer.
"This is mad," Harry muttered, and almost turned around and went back to the cottage. Surely Snape would know if other wizards lived around here, and, if they did, whether they owned a horse that must be partially a magical creature if it communicated so well and liked humans so much.
But there he ran into the same difficulty as before: Snape had no reason to tell him things. He had only told him about Bellatrix’s Horcrux and that his owl could fly between dimensions, Harry thought, because they were the minimum necessary to get the help he wanted. Other than that, who knew? He might spend weeks or months without telling Harry anything further, and insulting him when he asked.
"Could you take me back home?" Harry asked the horse, sure now that it would provide some intelligible response.
The horse bobbed its head eagerly. Harry shook his and came nearer, slinging a leg over the horse’s back.
The horse rose carefully, glancing back at Harry’s leg once or twice as if to make sure he was comfortable. Harry looked at the horizon and saw no sign of a human dwelling. He waited in curiosity to see where the horse would take him.
The horse stepped forwards. Harry realized another disadvantage of no bridle or reins then and reached out to grip its mane.
The mane felt stranger than ever in his hands. Harry looked more closely at it.
Weedy...
It was made of weed.
Harry snapped his head up. The horse was glancing back at him again, head turned fully on its neck.
Its face had changed utterly. Its dark eyes flared with green fire, and its slightly parted jaws were full of jagged teeth. Conical teeth, coming to a point, Harry saw, staring at them in frozen fascination, like the teeth of predators that swallowed their prey whole.
Kelpie!
Harry tried to rip his hands from the mane, and discovered they were entangled. He tried to pull his legs away from the horse’s sides, and found out they wouldn’t come. The kelpie stood there and watched him struggle, tilting its head to the side like a bird.
Harry didn’t panic. He still had his wand, even though it was caught up in the mane, and he knew the counter to a kelpie. They could be easily tamed by conjuring up a bridle and using a Placement Charm to put it over their heads. One incantation would make the bridle appear--
Should have made the bridle appear. The words fell dead on dead air, and Harry remembered, too late, what Snape had said about certain spells not being invented here. Probably the wizards who had lived in their dimension, if any had, didn’t have horses.
Shit!
The kelpie cried out, a ringing neigh that quickly turned into a full-throated scream, and bolted forwards. Harry hung on, because he had no choice, but chanted another spell that should tangle and trip up its feet--
The kelpie leaped, and if the spell had come into being at all, it would have failed. Harry struggled with his fear as the kelpie curved down and down, thinking of other spells, knowing they must be there, if only his mind would stop flailing around and recall them--
They plunged beneath the surface of the lake.
Harry was holding his breath, but the impact with the cold water still shocked him and made little air bubbles escape around the corners of his teeth. Shivering, he tried to fight free again, but his hands and legs stayed right where they were.
With unfortunate clarity, he remembered what his training had had to say about kelpies. They like to drown their meat.
He squinted, trying to see in the murky water, and thought the kelpie’s head had turned back towards him. Perhaps it was going to watch as he died.
The information might have helped if he could get a hand free, if he had a weapon.
Panic was building and surging around the edges of Harry’s brain like the tide trying to force itself past a retaining wall. He was a trained Auror, but using his training depended on being able to use magic, on being able to fight back against an enemy who had captured him, on being able to breathe.
Distantly, like a sound heard on another planet, he thought the kelpie snorted smugly.
Harry closed his eyes, shutting out the murky water and the dim movements that might be the kelpie leaning in to take an early taste, and groped about in his mind for spells that might work here. Snape had some Potions equipment; he must have been able to conjure it--unless he’d brought it. He had spells that fastened the stones of his cottage together--unless he had brewed the mortar. He had fire--
Harry’s eyes snapped open.
Incendio! he thought with all his might. Incendio!
The water around them turned boiling. The kelpie neighed and gave a whole-body flinch, its sides squirming like a snake’s. Harry lunged in the opposite direction at the same moment, and one hand ripped free of the mane.
He could raise the wand now and add the movements that made the spell more powerful. He still didn’t speak, because his ears were already ringing and his sight darkening and he had no interest in finding out what a mouthful of the lake water was like. Incendio! he thought, while his arm traveled more slowly than normal against the pressure of the water and any curses of frustration had to be suppressed.
This time, the jet of boiling water made his back feel as if it were being roasted, but it also came from behind, and seemed to sting the kelpie on the flanks. Harry felt it gather its muscles. He tried to tense, then froze, not sure that was the correct reaction.
Meanwhile, his brain shrieked, Drowning! Drowning! Drowning!, which made it hard to concentrate.
The kelpie bucked him off.
His legs came free, then his other hand. Harry raised his wand and cast the Bubble-Head Charm, hoping desperately that that was one that would work here.
Nothing happened. Harry tilted his head back, half-spinning over, not sure which way was up and which way down, just sure that the lighter part was the surface, and stretched out his arms, trying to swim.
The water pushed at him. More air forced its way out of his mouth, and Harry’s lungs were protesting that he would have to breathe soon, lake be damned. Black clouds expanded and pulsed in front of his eyes, timed to the beating of his heart. His head spun. He wanted to vomit almost more than he wanted to breathe.
Rise! Come on, damnit!
Something snagged his leg, and for a panicked moment he thought it was the kelpie’s teeth. Then he realized that it was long and flexible and thin, probably a weed rather than the kelpie. Anyway, it wasn’t restricting his movements. He went on thrashing his way, profoundly ungraceful, towards the spot of light.
His mouth opened.
The water seemed to drown him both inside and out, subduing his mind and his body at the same moment. Harry coughed and gasped and swallowed more of the lake, fighting the pressure and the panic and the temptation to turn in a downwards direction all at once, hating this, hating that he was dying in a place far away from home like this, for the price of nothing but one of Snape’s mad ideas, Snape had probably replaced Dumbledore and thought--
Then one of his hands hit something that wasn’t water, pushing back too solidly, and Harry reached within himself for the courage that would give him what he needed and pushed towards what he thought was up, uncoiling.
Air met him.
Harry had never realized how blessed it was simply to breathe. He opened his mouth and flopped on the bank, spewing water into the reeds, writhing and coughing. He tried to drag himself out of the lake--he didn’t want to stay in it one second longer than he needed to--but he was too weak. He stayed there, spitting and hacking, his eyes bulging and his thoughts spinning in his head.
"Potter. Undignified as always."
Harry didn’t have the energy to open his eyes and glare. He spat instead, and he thought there must be blood mixed with the water by now, it was coming from so deep inside him. Of course, he hoped it wasn’t, but he couldn’t look yet. He would just have to slog through this and come out the other end.
And hope that everything else doesn’t.
An impatient sigh sounded from above him, and then someone crouched beside him and cast a spell Harry couldn’t hear; it was nothing more than a murmur from beside his ear. Harry screamed as his lungs seemed to turn themselves inside out and more water than he had realized existed leaped from between his lips in a painful fountain. He sagged down until his face touched the ground and opened his mouth. He wanted to moan, but he didn’t have the strength even for that.
"The Summoning Charm still works, thank Merlin," Snape said, in the detached voice he had used when someone asked a non-stupid question in Potions class. "Come here, Potter. I don’t fancy trying to nurse you and take care of my tasks at once." Harry was swung into the air and placed over a hunched, scrawny shoulder that he suspected Snape was deliberately trying to make as uncomfortable as possible.
"You could have warned me about the fucking kelpie," Harry said, or tried to say. The words made him cough, and that made his ribs hurt, and his body began to heave, forcing out more water. Snape’s Summoning Charm, predictably, hadn’t worked completely.
Blackness was creeping back in, unwanted, uninvited, but still there. Harry still heard Snape’s answer, though.
"I did warn you about it, Potter. That was Bellatrix’s Horcrux."
Part Two.
Pairing Harry/Snape
Rating: R
Warnings: Profanity, violence, sex, ambiguous ending. Assumes that Snape survived DH.
Word count: ~37,000
Summary: The hunt for Bellatrix’s Horcrux will take Harry and Snape into another dimension, into a confrontation with a legendary monster, and into conflict and collision with each other.
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.
Author's Note: This was written for
cluegirl in the 2010 hds_beltane fest, but not posted elsewhere until now. Many thanks to my beta, who went above and beyond the call of duty.Deep in the Drowning Green
Harry didn’t believe the rumors. Anyone could spread a rumor.
He didn’t believe the immediate conclusion that the Ministry tried to jump to for the first killing. As he knew to his disgust, particularly since the war, anyone could kill.
He didn’t believe the stammering witness who was paraded before the Wizengamot to try to persuade them to justify extreme force. Anyone could stammer and blush and pale and even faint, if that was necessary. Harry had seen more tricks from witnesses in three months of being an Auror than he had expected to see in a lifetime.
When he saw her for himself, he began to believe.
*
Harry had chosen a house on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. When the doors of Hogwarts had closed behind him for the last time, he found that he wasn’t in such a hurry to leave after all. True, the school held some of his most horrible memories, but also some of his best. It was a place of the past.
Harry was sick of trying to leave the past behind.
True, he was away most of the day, and often a good portion of the night, during Auror training, and his schedule was only worse since he had become a full Auror. But he still got to spend a lot of time at the house, sometimes even entire weekends, and he had found that he liked looking at a garden that was his own and tending the small flowers that were all he grew in it and looking over its stone walls towards the walls of Hogwarts.
He slept in a bedroom that overlooked the garden. It had wood-paneled walls and reminded Harry both greatly and not at all of the cupboard. He was fond of it, and of the thick scratchy blankets that draped the foot of the bed, a present from Hermione, and of the Chudley Cannons poster that hung on the wall, a gift from Ron. He leaned the new Firebolt he’d bought for Quidditch the summer after the war against the door and considered the place the most comfortable room in the house.
The Killing Curse came through the window. Only the way Harry had arranged the bed meant it went over his head instead of into it. At least his training had been thorough enough to make him snatch his wand up a moment later and roll off the bed and then underneath it, listening intently for breathing all the while.
It was there. Laughter like a ghost’s laugh. Thick, creaking footsteps, that made Harry think at first, with the dreams still clinging in shreds and tatters to his mind, that an enormous puppet was coming after him. A sharp face that poked into his window, rising as if fearless, staring into the shadows.
Searching for him.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
Harry took a deep breath, put aside all the jabber in his brain about how she was dead, and flung himself out from under the bed. There was no way to disguise his rush. He didn’t try. He just rose up in front of the window and used the extra-powerful Blasting Curse that his trainers had told him over and over again not to use, trying his best just to kill her, kill her and have done with it.
He hit her. She flew the length of the garden and hit the wall. There was a noise like a mousetrap going off. Harry rose up with his hand on the windowsill, half-kneeling, ready to duck again if she picked herself up again.
She picked herself up again.
This time, Harry could see the source of the creaking and the puppet-like noise. She moved with the shuffling, limping gait of someone on strings, and when she opened her mouth, she produced the ghost-laughter he had heard before. She could be hurt, and Harry suspected she was carrying a lot of wounds around in her body that hadn’t healed or barely healed.
But she couldn’t die.
"You can’t kill me, baby," she said. "Small chance that you’d manage. You’re too little." And she chanted some spell he’d never heard before but which made his elbow joints explode in pure white-hot fire.
Unfortunately for Bellatrix, Harry had a high pain tolerance. It made his trainers shake their heads--and Hermione, sometimes--but it saved his life now. He ignored the spell and managed to lift his wand arm anyway, calling out the incantation that would wrap her up in a magic-proof cage. If he couldn’t kill her, he would capture her and let the Ministry deal with her.
But she was gone before he finished the first syllable. Harry smiled grimly. She’d learned some caution, then.
He leaned his head on the windowsill and whimpered a little, because his elbows really hurt. Then he stood up and went to report the attack.
And ask for healing from St. Mungo’s. That was important, too.
*
"So she’s really hunting you." Ron said it emptily, like an echo in a tomb, and put down his teacup so hard on the edge of the table Harry thought it would crack. Then he put his hands over his face and dragged them slowly down, breathing so rapidly that Harry winced. "Fuck."
"Yeah." Harry stared into his own teacup and wondered if they should be discussing this in the middle of their office. Then he shook his head. The rumors of Bellatrix’s return were already everywhere, and he thought she was probably too mad to have allies in the Ministry who would report their words to her.
Besides, she already knows she attacked me, he thought, touching his elbow with the flat of his hand. And so do I.
"How did she survive?" Ron tilted back and asked the question of the ceiling.
Harry swallowed. "I have a theory." It was one Ron wouldn’t like. Ron sometimes seemed to have decided that a large part of their experiences during the war were a dream. Harry had mentioned the Sword of Gryffindor the other day, and Ron had shaken his head in wonder and asked what made him think of that. Harry spoke these words while keeping a cautious eye on Ron, ready to back away if he came too close to an old wound.
Ron looked at him, the flat expression on his face speaking his guess.
"A Horcrux," Harry said. "We know that your mum hit her with the Killing Curse, just like I hit Voldemort with the reflected Killing Curse when I was a baby. And she looked inhuman. Voldemort was a monster, too, by the time he came back from death."
"She didn’t look like the same kind of monster, you said." Ron turned away to rearrange the paperwork on his desk, and his turned back was like a shut door. No, Harry thought in hopelessness, eyeing him, a shut door would have more tendency to open. "Surely that indicates that she survived by some other method."
"We don’t know everything about Horcruxes," Harry said. "But what we do know suggests that it’s the only way to survive a Killing Curse." He smiled, though he had the impression that his smile had the same desperation as the painted expression on a clown’s face, and tried to lighten the mood. "Unless you’re suggesting that someone loved Bellatrix enough to make a sacrifice of love for her the way my mum did for me."
"I don’t want to joke about this," Ron said, and Harry winced and shut up for a long moment when he heard his voice.
"Sorry," Harry said at last. "But I do think that a Horcrux is our best guess. We never did find all the collection of Dark artifacts and Dark Arts books that Bellatrix and her husband were supposed to have gathered. And at least one of the missing books had information about how to make Horcruxes in it."
Ron turned around and stared at him this time. "How do you know that?"
"I kept track of it," Harry said, meeting Ron’s eyes and wishing he knew why his palms were clammy and his forehead hot. After all, it wasn’t as though Ron was the only one who would have liked to forget the war, or the only one who had dangerous knowledge about Horcruxes. "I thought--well, I reckon I never trusted that all the knowledge of how to make them would have died with Voldemort."
"It didn’t," Ron muttered, and lowered his head onto his folded arms. "It survives in us."
"I know," Harry said quietly. "But right now, we need to find out if that’s what she’s using, and then where it is and how to destroy it if that’s true."
Ron sat with his head down for a few more minutes. He was taking deep, long breaths that made him sound as if he had a broken bone. But Harry sat still and left him alone, because he knew the signs. Ron was getting ready to take on a big task that he really hated. This was the way he’d acted before he went down to the holding cells to question a Dark wizard who’d murdered seven women by cutting them all into thirds, and he’d eventually got the answers that sealed the case.
Ron finally raised his head, and said, "Sorry, mate. If you were thinking that it would come up again someday, I just hoped that we were all done with it."
Harry nodded his acceptance. "So where do we begin?"
*
He should have anticipated Ron’s answer to that question, Harry thought later, looking around at the neatly stacked, leather-smelling shelves of the Weasley-Granger library. For Ron, still, most questions began and ended with Hermione.
"She could have a Horcrux," Hermione said doubtfully, blowing dust away from a page she was examining. "Grilius, in 769, said that sometimes Horcruxes brought back bodies that had the remnants of old injuries in them." She turned the page, and her voice had a trace of the eager, chill threat Harry imagined in the voice of a pack of hounds hunting down prey. "In fact, apparently that’s the way Horcruxes normally function."
"Normally?" Harry asked, thinking of Voldemort and trying to put the word Hermione had just spoken into that context.
Hermione shot him a sharp look. "I meant, when someone only has one of them. Not seven, the way Voldemort had."
Harry nodded again. Now he was examining the windows of the library and the wards that crackled behind them. Hermione took the safety of her books seriously. Still, he wondered if the wards would hold up should Bellatrix take it into her head to attack here.
And she might very well. Voldemort’s madness had at least been purposeful, and the connection Harry had to him through the scar had made him feel as though he had some level of control over his enemy’s actions, illusory as that was. Harry did not think he understood anything of the jagged, broken-pattern way in which Bellatrix’s mind worked.
"How are we going to find the Horcrux?" he asked, thinking of that. "The Horcrux could be anything. It could be hidden anywhere. Bellatrix could tell us straight out what and where it was and we probably wouldn’t understand her." He clenched his fists in his lap and swore softly, thinking about it.
"Well, we aren’t going to get anywhere by acting as though we’ll lose before we begin the battle," Hermione said, in the heavy tone that was meant to weigh down Harry’s emotions like a paperweight so he could consider them calmly. "For the moment, we’ll assume that Bellatrix’s Horcrux is a Dark artifact. She learned the idea from Voldemort. Wouldn’t she have wanted to imitate him in every way possible? That means she would choose powerful magical objects, perhaps from the Founders. There are a limited number of those."
Harry took a deep breath, feeling as though he were surfacing from far beneath the water. "You’re right, of course, Hermione," he said. "Do you think we ought to make sure we know where the Sword of Gryffindor is?"
Hermione gave him a faint smile. "I don’t think she would have had a chance to make a Horcrux of that," she said soothingly. "We had it too much of the time, and we would have noticed a change in it." Harry opened his mouth to dispute that, but Hermione held up a hand, and Harry subsided into grumbling silence. "We would have," Hermione said. "But we know that she had access to Hogwarts during that year when Snape was Headmaster, if she wanted it. That means we should check--oh, perhaps the Sorting Hat, or other things around the school that might belong to the Founders. I know there are objects we never investigated and we didn’t know about at the time. I only learned of them years later." By now her eyes were bright and her cheeks flushing with the excitement of the hunt. "We’ll find it, Harry."
Harry relaxed. He would participate in the hunt, of course, because as much as he loved Hermione, he had lost his faith in her infallibility over the years. But it was good to be reminded that the search was not hopeless.
It was good to have friends.
*
After five hours in a dusty, musty, rusty vault deep in the Ministry that stored any artifacts reputed to have the most minor of connections with the Founders, Harry was beginning to reconsider his stance on hope.
They hadn’t found anything at Hogwarts. Though McGonagall, with an air of dubiousness that made Harry feel as if it were about to storm the entire time they were in her office, had let them examine the Sorting Hat, they found no sign of tampering with it. Nor was there a single artifact in Hogwarts that had a trace of the dark Horcrux magic. McGonagall had told them tartly that she rather thought the professors would have noticed by now; Harry had been obliged to confess what the Horcruxes were when he returned to finish his NEWTs on the pain of penetrating stares, and McGonagall had come up with spells that would supposedly detect the presence of their magic on school grounds after that. No, Bellatrix’s Horcrux was not hidden at Hogwarts.
Hermione had promptly suggested Gringotts, in the Lestrange vault, and they had spent at fortnight trying to negotiate with the goblins to see any ruins that might be left. The goblins were not impressed with their promise not to ransack the bank again. In the end, however, that produced nothing, either; apparently most of the contents of the Lestrange vault had turned to slag and dross during their escape with the dragon.
After that, it was the vault in the Ministry. The Department of Mysteries gathered mostly Dark artifacts and powerful ones, but they also, as Hermione lectured Harry in the lift all the way down, picked up things of legendary interest, under the pretense of keeping them safe for future generations who wanted to know the history of wizardkind. If the artifacts were only ornamental instead of useful, then the pretense became reality. There was an enormous collection of what were supposed to be Slytherin’s robes, Ravenclaw’s wands, Hufflepuff’s personal spellbooks, and Gryffindor’s chamberpots. As well as plenty of other things that made Harry feel historians must be mad.
He put aside yet another wand that McGonagall’s Horcrux-detecting spell had failed to work on, and sighed. Hermione was still head-deep in a box of books, occasionally grunting like a satisfied pig. Harry shook his head with a frown and sat back.
"Do you think we’ll find anything here?" he asked, when Hermione was only occupied with one book instead of a whole box and he thought it less likely she would start at the sound of his voice and topple over.
Hermione stared at him. "I’ve already discovered five spells that have been lost for centuries," she said.
"Yes," Harry said, "but do you think it’s likely Bellatrix’s Horcrux is here?"
Hermione seemed to recall herself and sat down on one of the boxes, which creaked. "No," she admitted reluctantly. "Even if they didn’t know what it was, the Department of Mysteries would probably have sensed the Dark magic in her Horcrux and made sure it was safely destroyed."
"Or kept somewhere," Harry muttered. Though he knew Unspeakables were supposed to destroy things that could be dangerous, his experience working with them during Auror training, let alone the time he’d been here during his fifth year, suggested that they had a stronger than normal fascination with shaking and poking things to see how they worked.
Hermione glanced at him repressively. "This, they would have destroyed," she said, and Harry had to nod.
Then Hermione drooped a bit. "But I don’t know any other source of Founder’s artifacts," she admitted. "We might have to research for months before we even learn what object she could have taken, let alone find it."
"And we don’t have months," Harry said, thinking of the attack Bellatrix had launched last night. Her victims hadn’t died. It might have been kinder if they had.
"I know," Hermione said. The weariness in her voice seemed to reach out and wrap around Harry like a dense, dusty smoke, choking off the slight hilarity that had been keeping him going so far. He stared at the floor between his feet and wondered what he was supposed to do. He was an Auror, but that didn’t mean he could protect people from Bellatrix. He had killed Voldemort and helped destroy the Horcruxes, but then, he’d had a lot of help from Dumbledore--at least some idea of what the Horcruxes were, if not where to look. What was he supposed to do this time?
"It would be so much simpler if she had imitated Voldemort," Hermione said. "But I don’t think she did."
Inspiration hit Harry with the force of sunlight. He sat up and said, "What if she did? But what if she didn’t use a Founder’s artifact?"
Hermione frowned at him. "You think she might have used some personal object, like the diary? But that doesn’t leave us any better off. We don’t know what might have mattered to Bellatrix when she was a child."
"What about a living creature?" Harry insisted. "Voldemort made a Horcrux out of Nagini, and Bellatrix would have been around Nagini a lot more than any of the other Horcruxes. Maybe that made some difference to her madness and she decided to make one based on her. It’s at least worth a try, isn’t it?"
Hermione gasped, her expression brightening. "Harry, you’re a genius," she said, thus ensuring that this memory would become one Harry often put in his Pensieve to relive. "Of course. We’ll still have to look for what she used, but at least we can look in the records that were taken from the places she lived during the war and see what creatures she was around!" She flung her arms around Harry and hugged him tight. "Thank you!"
Harry didn’t see what he’d done other than come up with an idea, but he understood after a moment of hugging Hermione back. He had given her a direction to start her research in, and for Hermione, there was no more valuable gift.
*
Harry woke groggily. It seemed to him he’d been having an interesting dream, where he walked through flowering meadows hand-in-hand with Ginny and everything was working out all right for them. It would have been great if that dream could have replaced the reality, where he and Ginny had realized sadly that they weren’t suited to each other and drifted apart. Waking up to something hovering at the foot of his bed was a distinct letdown from that.
The first thing he thought of was Bellatrix, or at least the ghost of one of her victims, and he grabbed his wand. The thing didn’t cackle, though, and when Harry cast Lumos on his wand, he saw it was an owl.
The owl landed on the bed, and Harry eyed it for a minute before he reached out and took the letter from it. It was battered-looking and disreputable. It had black feathers with glimpses of gold underneath them when it shifted, as though it had robbed a dragon’s hoard. Its beak appeared to have been put on its face by someone with no notion of what a beak should look like; it was sharp, pale, and resembled dried ivory. It had heavy, jagged talons with claws Harry could swear looked like iron.
It didn’t bite him or tear his beating heart from his chest, though, which Harry decided would have to be good enough for right now. He opened the letter, reading it with one eye while he kept the other eye on the owl.
Potter, said the letter, in writing as jagged as the owl’s beak, you will never find Bellatrix’s Horcrux with the clumsy efforts you have made so far. She has hidden it in another place, sideways from the world. The only way you can find and kill it is to go to that place, which is not simple to find.
Harry narrowed his eyes. The letter was unsigned, the handwriting familiar enough to stir a faint memory but no more than that. Who in the world could know about Bellatrix’s Horcrux? Harry turned the letter over, seeking for a clue, but it was only one sheet of thin parchment, without a marking on the other side.
The clumsy owl beat its wings with a sound like ringing bells and lifted into the air, hovering for a moment in a way that made it saw back and forth. Then it landed on Harry’s shoulder and drove its claws into his flesh.
"Ouch!" hissed Harry, rearing back and holding up his wand at the awkward angle necessary to deal with a threat so close. He was going to hex the owl’s head off before it took a fancy to his ear.
The owl opened its mouth, and arctic breath streamed over Harry. He thought he heard it say something, a single word, before the familiar pull of a Portkey seized him.
Harry went cursing, and not only because he had never heard of anyone making an owl into a Portkey. The word had been familiar, in a voice that at least played the right chords in his memory.
"Imbecile," the voice had said.
It was Snape’s.
*
Harry landed with a bump on something relatively soft, with a sense of largeness around him that told him he was outside. He scrambled up and around in a circle, wand aimed at--whatever he needed to aim it at.
There was no one in sight. Harry was, so far as he could see in the pitiful light his Lumos Charm cast, standing on an expanse of scrubby, short grass next to a large lake. There was a crooked shape in the distance on the lakeshore that might be a tree. To the left of him was a tiny house as patched-together and ramshackle as the owl.
Said horrid bird lifted from his shoulder and flapped heavily towards it. Harry stared at the house and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did, except that the door of the house opened to let the owl in. Then it closed, and silence lapped around Harry like the water on the edge of the lake.
Harry made the Lumos brighter still and held up the wand, turning in a slow circle. No matter where or how far he looked, the country remained essentially featureless. The single tree beside the lake was the only one Harry could see, and the way its dark branches curled back on themselves suggested that it wasn’t the healthiest plant that had ever lived. The grass stretched out in a broad, flat plain. No walls, no other dwellings but the house, no hills. Harry sniffed and thought there was a faint, alien taste to the air, tart, like lemons, but it faded before he could be certain.
Or did I get used to it?
Harry glanced uneasily at the lake. It had a wavy bank rather than a curved one, and it was big enough that it was hard to see the far side.
Of course, the darkness probably doesn’t help with that, Harry thought, and edged forwards. He wondered if the lake contained a monster, the way the one at Hogwarts contained the squid, and what he would do if it did.
The whole time, a persistent beating in the back of his head told him to go into the house. Harry ignored it. He half-suspected what he would find waiting for him there, and he didn’t want to face it.
Something caught him across the shins. Harry stumbled and rolled immediately to his knees, wand up to blast it.
No monster, from the lake or otherwise, met his eyes. Instead, Harry saw, he had tripped over a carved stone, with scratches in its surface that obviously weren’t natural. Harry bent down and studied them.
Most of them, he couldn’t make sense of, and he didn’t know if that was because of their awkward shape, the extreme age of the carving, or something else. But he did puzzle out two words that made his fingers curl hard into the dirt.
Godric Gryffindor.
Harry swallowed. What is this place?
"Potter. Stop crawling through the dirt and come inside like an adult wizard." The voice paused, then added, "If you have merely grown taller instead of more intelligent, then feel free to ignore that invitation."
The voice was the same as the one that had come out of the owl’s beak. Harry stood up, still keeping his eyes on the stone until the moment when he had to turn around and face Snape, for his self-respect if nothing else.
Snape had sallow skin still. He had a jagged nose that looked as if he used it to peck eyes out--though Harry had to admit that it wasn’t as ugly as the beak of the owl sitting on his shoulder. He had a long series of parallel scratches down the side of his throat, which Harry guessed must be the mark of Nagini’s fangs. If anything was unexpected, it was only the interest in the dark eyes that fastened on Harry, and the fact that he seemed to have found a potion that rendered his hair even more like the strings of a mop.
Harry wanted to say something like, But you’re dead! That couldn’t be true, though, not if Snape was standing in front of him. He had tried to get beyond stating the obvious in the past few years. So he gripped his wand and said nothing.
"Tell me, Potter," Snape continued, pacing forwards with slow, stately steps that nonetheless made the owl on his shoulder jog back and forth until it tightened its grip, "are all Aurors as poorly trained as you? Or would anyone in the Auror Department have fallen victim to a Portkey as simple as the one I used on you?"
Harry clenched his jaw until he thought he could feel one of his teeth crack. He wanted to say there was nothing simple about turning an owl into a Portkey, and that anyone else would have fallen victim to the same trick. He wanted to say that it would have made a lot more sense for Snape to just send him the information about Bellatrix’s Horcrux, if he had it, in the letter instead of bringing him here. He wanted to say--
Oh, all sorts of things.
In the end, he relaxed his jaw long enough to say, "What did you want from me, Snape?" He was proud of himself. His voice was as bland and rough as the grass under their feet.
Snape stopped walking closer and studied him like a Potions ingredient that wasn’t as dead as he’d thought it was. Harry did nothing, said nothing, just gripped his wand and stared back.
Then Snape said, in the most pleasant tone Harry had ever heard him use--because it was the most neutral--"Come inside," and turned back to the cottage.
Harry followed him, because it would look childish not to. Then he caught the thoughts he was using and snorted.
This is Snape. Whoever invented the term "childish grudge" probably foresaw his existence and invented it especially for him. Why do you worry what he thinks of you?
Harry flipped one shoulder up in a quick shrug, even though there was no one to see it. Well, he cared what he thought of himself. And the more he irritated Snape, the longer the man would probably keep whatever information he had to himself, and the more of Harry’s time he would waste.
It was as good a rationale as any for ducking inside the cottage behind Snape and looking around.
Harry’s first impression was that he didn’t want to sneeze in here. Every shelf, every box on the floor, every table, was crowded with glass vials or cauldrons, most of them filled to the brim with disgusting liquids. (Well, Harry didn’t know they were disgusting, but they had enough thickness and odd combinations of colors to look like it). The only clear area was around the largest cauldron in the center of the room, which made grumbling sloppy sounds to itself. Harry looked a second time, but didn’t see another door. He wondered where Snape slept and used the loo, and then decided that he didn’t absolutely need that knowledge and so would disregard his curiosity.
Snape turned around to face him. In the dim light from a fireplace that flickered invisibly behind a table, the scars from Nagini’s bite looked even worse. Harry studied him in silence and decided that he wouldn’t ask how Snape had survived. Probably some combination of Potions knowledge and sheer bloody refusal to die.
"Why did you contact me?" he asked.
Snape curled his lip. "Why, Potter, I should think that would be obvious," he said. "I am giving you another chance to be a hero. You do so enjoy it, and my world is marginally more pleasant when I see you acting competent."
Harry gripped his hands together behind his back and wondered if Snape wanted him to yell. Probably. That way, he could feel superior.
What he couldn’t have any way of knowing--wherever Snape had been for the last four years, Harry doubted it was in regular contact with the wizarding world--was that the Head Auror had insisted that Harry work on managing his temper. He still lost it when someone committed a murder or bragged about committing one in front of him, or when Ron got drunk and wouldn’t leave certain embarrassing memories alone, but it would take a lot more than a few insults to make him shout now.
Which doesn’t prevent me from filing down my teeth with the grinding, Harry thought, and said, "Fine. But what do you get out of it?"
Snape paused, studying him again. Harry had no idea what he hoped to see in Harry’s face this time, and tried to maintain the bland stare back.
Snape turned away at last, and said, "This place is sideways from the real world, a pocket of dead history that the Dark Lord discovered, investigated, and decided held no further use. It has a use for me. I can find the Potions ingredients I need here, and conduct my brewing in peace. But Bellatrix has hidden her Horcrux here." Harry was impressed. The malice Snape used to form those words outweighed even the sort he’d shown Harry when he was screaming that he was the Half-Blood Prince. "Its presence disturbs me. I wish to destroy it and regain my solitude."
Harry waited for something more and repeated, "Fine. But why can’t you destroy it yourself?" He ran his eyes over the ranks of potions again. "I imagine you’re fully capable."
Snape gave him yet another odd look. Harry hoped he would find something else to do soon. The stay in this place, wherever it was, would get boring if that was Snape’s only occupation.
"My potions have no effects on the Horcrux," Snape said, when he had gathered whatever information his silent stare from Harry seemed intended to gather and turned his eyes away again. He put a hand on a stirring rod in the middle of the cauldron and moved it idly back and forth. "Neither do my spells. The only spell that might, Fiendfyre, does not function in this universe, where it was never discovered. But I have managed to damage its defenses. I am not weak, though I have come near to dying." He touched the side of his throat. Harry wondered if he knew he was doing it; it looked like a habitual gesture. "You are someone who has strength of your own." He glared at Harry this time, which was a bit more comforting because it was more familiar. "Together, we may be able to destroy it."
"Right," Harry said. He wanted to ask lots of questions, but he doubted that Snape would answer him even now, and he didn’t feel like wasting his breath or hearing any more insults. "Then let me go back to the Auror Department and find spellbooks about ancient spells that might work, or ask Hermione--"
"That was a one-way Portkey I used," Snape said. "To travel between the dimensions is exhausting and perilous. You will not be returning until the creature is destroyed."
"Really." Harry couldn’t prevent the grinding from emerging in his voice this time. "And you couldn’t have bloody warned me before this happened? Or at least left me time to write a note? And where am I supposed to sleep?"
Snape looked down his nose at Harry. "To answer the least important question first, in the same place I do. This cottage does not hold enough room for more than that, and we do not dare sleep outside, for fear of encountering the Horcrux’s malignant effects."
"What?" Harry snapped, undone at the thought of sleeping in the same bed as Snape--or, more likely considering the amount of space in here, on the same pile of dirty, filthy rags. "You’ve got to be--"
"My owl can travel between the worlds with relative ease," Snape continued. "He is a made thing, a construct, as you may have noticed." He touched the iron talons of the owl, who still sat on his shoulder and watched Harry with what seemed an unrelenting hate. "You will communicate with your friends that way. And if I had warned you, you would have resisted. We do not have time for resistance."
"Does the Horcrux have a deadline it has to be destroyed by?" Harry asked, momentarily diverted.
"No," Snape said, looking honestly surprised for a moment. "I wish to have my peace back as soon as possible."
"Then what was that about--"
"I wish to have my peace back as soon as possible," Snape said, in the loud, long tones he used when he thought he was speaking to an imbecile, which meant it was the voice Harry had always remembered him by. "Your arguments would have made it take longer than it has to."
Harry rolled his eyes.
Snape didn’t appear to notice, instead nodding to a corner of the room that looked as if it was solid with Potions racks. "This way."
Harry followed, shaking his head. He was tired, he decided, and he wanted to get back to sleep. That was the only reason he didn’t ask more questions, didn’t demand that Snape send his owl with a letter to Hermione this instant.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was because he was already beginning to realize that he wouldn’t get any answers.
*
Pale sunlight woke Harry. He’d always had trouble sleeping with light shining on his face. He sat up, rubbing his eyes, and yawned.
A clash of wings made him jump. When he looked over, Snape’s badly-made owl was glaring at him from the top of a shelf. It gave Harry a few more moments to contemplate how rude he was just for existing, then turned back to stare at Snape. Harry guessed it was watching over his sleep.
Not the kind of thing I’d choose to wake up to, Harry thought, and levered himself out of the pallet as quietly as possible. To his surprise, the thing had turned out to be a real bed, if on the floor and made from a mattress filled with old, crackling feathers. When he was looking at the cottage and estimating the dimensions, Harry had forgotten about wizardspace.
But sleeping next to Snape was still an unpleasant experience, Harry quickly corrected himself, as he wound his way carefully around the racks and shelves and cauldrons and major, central cauldron and out into the open to piss. (He didn’t want to imagine what Snape’s bathroom looked like). Snape grumbled. He kicked. Once he had hissed something right into Harry’s ear that had Harry waking up in a panic, grabbing his wand. And of course there was no chance of getting comfortably naked in any bed he was in. Harry just had to thank the fate that had led him to being so tired last evening that he’d collapsed into bed still in his robes. Otherwise, the owl probably would have brought him here without giving him time to dress.
Wherever "here" is.
Harry took another look around by daylight. There was still nothing interesting in sight. He would have expected to see some sign of mountains or hills in the distance, but there were none. The briskly cold air around him seemed to suggest he was still in England, or at least somewhere in the north, but the lack of farms, moors, a view of the ocean, and any other distinguishing features made it impossible to tell where.
Something Snape had said last night tugged at Harry’s memory.
He couldn’t use Fiendfyre because it hasn’t been invented here.
So this is a lost piece of history? Someplace where wizards didn’t invent certain spells? Or maybe never lived? No, that can’t be it, or we wouldn’t be able to use magic at all, and the Horcrux probably couldn’t exist.
Harry shuddered at what that thought implied. I could have lived my life quite happily never knowing that Horcruxes were some of the first magic to be invented.
He set out for a walk around the lake, wondering as he went when breakfast was and if he would be able to eat it. Since he didn’t have another goal, he started out for the withered black tree, which didn’t look any more attractive with the sun up, either. Lightning had probably struck it sometime in the past, Harry thought idly.
Then he stepped around it, and stared.
Something living was here after all.
The creature was a black horse, cropping the grass close to the edge of the lake with a determination that hinted it didn’t get to eat often. Its mane hung down its neck in knotted strands that suggested no one had been taking care of it. It scraped the grass with a hoof and then huffed, drawing its head back to stare down disapprovingly.
Harry couldn’t help it; he laughed.
The horse jerked its head up, staring at him. For a moment, its tail flicked and its flanks shuddered as though it were considering running. Then it went back to grazing, watching him with one suspicious eye in the meantime.
Harry came slowly closer. The horse watched him still, but didn’t attempt to run. It even let Harry step up to it and stroke its neck. It wasn’t tall, about as big as a Shetland pony, but its coat was smooth and short, like the grass, instead of shaggy. It leaned against him with a small sigh, abandoning its grazing to snort unexpectedly sweet breath into his face.
"Who do you belong to?" Harry asked it quietly. The horse cocked its head towards his voice, but with no sign of understanding. "Probably not Snape. I can’t blame you for avoiding him. He’d chop you up for Potions ingredients." The horse gave a little squeal, and Harry laughed again. "But you must be used to humans," he added, as the horse lifted its chin to be scratched, "with the way you’re reacting to me."
The horse closed its large dark eyes and gave no opinion one way or the other.
Harry looked it over carefully. If it could provide him any evidence of where it had come from, then he would try to find the wizards, or at least the people, who owned it. They could help him learn more about the life in this place, which Snape seemed to be disinclined to chat about.
He could see no marks on the horse that would indicate anyone had used a saddle or bridle to tame it, and its coat was covered with little bristles and snarls that Harry thought people groomed out (though he had to admit his knowledge about horses was hazy). Its mane was sharp and ragged, almost weedy, as though someone had cut it at one point and then the horse had run away before it could happen again.
"I wouldn’t blame you if that’s what you did," Harry told the horse, who blinked its eyes at him and blew on the front of his robes as it searched for treats in his pockets. "I hated having my hair cut when Aunt Petunia did it, too."
He walked around the horse, and it craned its neck back to watch him do it. There were no marks on the flanks, either. Harry looked at its tail, but it appeared normal. So no one had cut that lately.
He came back around to the front of the horse and stroked its nose again. "Sorry," he said, when it tried to nuzzle into his hand. "I don’t have any food for you."
The horse stepped back and pawed at the ground with its hoof. Harry thought it was trying to find better grass, but it looked at him expectantly, and then dropped to one knee.
Harry felt his mouth fall open. "Someone must have owned you, and trained you to do that," he said. He found himself looking carefully at it for signs of wings that he’d somehow missed. Maybe it had escaped from a flying horse farm, and that was why it was so far away from all signs of other wizards. But no, it didn’t have wings.
The horse looked appealingly up at him. Harry blinked. He knew that animals didn’t really feel human emotions--although some of the smuggled magical creatures he’d rescued during his time as an Auror came pretty bloody close--but he thought its eyes showed loneliness and yearning.
"Do you want to be ridden?" he asked.
The horse snorted, an enormous blast of warm air, and flicked its tail in agitation, but didn’t stand up or move nearer.
"This is mad," Harry muttered, and almost turned around and went back to the cottage. Surely Snape would know if other wizards lived around here, and, if they did, whether they owned a horse that must be partially a magical creature if it communicated so well and liked humans so much.
But there he ran into the same difficulty as before: Snape had no reason to tell him things. He had only told him about Bellatrix’s Horcrux and that his owl could fly between dimensions, Harry thought, because they were the minimum necessary to get the help he wanted. Other than that, who knew? He might spend weeks or months without telling Harry anything further, and insulting him when he asked.
"Could you take me back home?" Harry asked the horse, sure now that it would provide some intelligible response.
The horse bobbed its head eagerly. Harry shook his and came nearer, slinging a leg over the horse’s back.
The horse rose carefully, glancing back at Harry’s leg once or twice as if to make sure he was comfortable. Harry looked at the horizon and saw no sign of a human dwelling. He waited in curiosity to see where the horse would take him.
The horse stepped forwards. Harry realized another disadvantage of no bridle or reins then and reached out to grip its mane.
The mane felt stranger than ever in his hands. Harry looked more closely at it.
Weedy...
It was made of weed.
Harry snapped his head up. The horse was glancing back at him again, head turned fully on its neck.
Its face had changed utterly. Its dark eyes flared with green fire, and its slightly parted jaws were full of jagged teeth. Conical teeth, coming to a point, Harry saw, staring at them in frozen fascination, like the teeth of predators that swallowed their prey whole.
Kelpie!
Harry tried to rip his hands from the mane, and discovered they were entangled. He tried to pull his legs away from the horse’s sides, and found out they wouldn’t come. The kelpie stood there and watched him struggle, tilting its head to the side like a bird.
Harry didn’t panic. He still had his wand, even though it was caught up in the mane, and he knew the counter to a kelpie. They could be easily tamed by conjuring up a bridle and using a Placement Charm to put it over their heads. One incantation would make the bridle appear--
Should have made the bridle appear. The words fell dead on dead air, and Harry remembered, too late, what Snape had said about certain spells not being invented here. Probably the wizards who had lived in their dimension, if any had, didn’t have horses.
Shit!
The kelpie cried out, a ringing neigh that quickly turned into a full-throated scream, and bolted forwards. Harry hung on, because he had no choice, but chanted another spell that should tangle and trip up its feet--
The kelpie leaped, and if the spell had come into being at all, it would have failed. Harry struggled with his fear as the kelpie curved down and down, thinking of other spells, knowing they must be there, if only his mind would stop flailing around and recall them--
They plunged beneath the surface of the lake.
Harry was holding his breath, but the impact with the cold water still shocked him and made little air bubbles escape around the corners of his teeth. Shivering, he tried to fight free again, but his hands and legs stayed right where they were.
With unfortunate clarity, he remembered what his training had had to say about kelpies. They like to drown their meat.
He squinted, trying to see in the murky water, and thought the kelpie’s head had turned back towards him. Perhaps it was going to watch as he died.
The information might have helped if he could get a hand free, if he had a weapon.
Panic was building and surging around the edges of Harry’s brain like the tide trying to force itself past a retaining wall. He was a trained Auror, but using his training depended on being able to use magic, on being able to fight back against an enemy who had captured him, on being able to breathe.
Distantly, like a sound heard on another planet, he thought the kelpie snorted smugly.
Harry closed his eyes, shutting out the murky water and the dim movements that might be the kelpie leaning in to take an early taste, and groped about in his mind for spells that might work here. Snape had some Potions equipment; he must have been able to conjure it--unless he’d brought it. He had spells that fastened the stones of his cottage together--unless he had brewed the mortar. He had fire--
Harry’s eyes snapped open.
Incendio! he thought with all his might. Incendio!
The water around them turned boiling. The kelpie neighed and gave a whole-body flinch, its sides squirming like a snake’s. Harry lunged in the opposite direction at the same moment, and one hand ripped free of the mane.
He could raise the wand now and add the movements that made the spell more powerful. He still didn’t speak, because his ears were already ringing and his sight darkening and he had no interest in finding out what a mouthful of the lake water was like. Incendio! he thought, while his arm traveled more slowly than normal against the pressure of the water and any curses of frustration had to be suppressed.
This time, the jet of boiling water made his back feel as if it were being roasted, but it also came from behind, and seemed to sting the kelpie on the flanks. Harry felt it gather its muscles. He tried to tense, then froze, not sure that was the correct reaction.
Meanwhile, his brain shrieked, Drowning! Drowning! Drowning!, which made it hard to concentrate.
The kelpie bucked him off.
His legs came free, then his other hand. Harry raised his wand and cast the Bubble-Head Charm, hoping desperately that that was one that would work here.
Nothing happened. Harry tilted his head back, half-spinning over, not sure which way was up and which way down, just sure that the lighter part was the surface, and stretched out his arms, trying to swim.
The water pushed at him. More air forced its way out of his mouth, and Harry’s lungs were protesting that he would have to breathe soon, lake be damned. Black clouds expanded and pulsed in front of his eyes, timed to the beating of his heart. His head spun. He wanted to vomit almost more than he wanted to breathe.
Rise! Come on, damnit!
Something snagged his leg, and for a panicked moment he thought it was the kelpie’s teeth. Then he realized that it was long and flexible and thin, probably a weed rather than the kelpie. Anyway, it wasn’t restricting his movements. He went on thrashing his way, profoundly ungraceful, towards the spot of light.
His mouth opened.
The water seemed to drown him both inside and out, subduing his mind and his body at the same moment. Harry coughed and gasped and swallowed more of the lake, fighting the pressure and the panic and the temptation to turn in a downwards direction all at once, hating this, hating that he was dying in a place far away from home like this, for the price of nothing but one of Snape’s mad ideas, Snape had probably replaced Dumbledore and thought--
Then one of his hands hit something that wasn’t water, pushing back too solidly, and Harry reached within himself for the courage that would give him what he needed and pushed towards what he thought was up, uncoiling.
Air met him.
Harry had never realized how blessed it was simply to breathe. He opened his mouth and flopped on the bank, spewing water into the reeds, writhing and coughing. He tried to drag himself out of the lake--he didn’t want to stay in it one second longer than he needed to--but he was too weak. He stayed there, spitting and hacking, his eyes bulging and his thoughts spinning in his head.
"Potter. Undignified as always."
Harry didn’t have the energy to open his eyes and glare. He spat instead, and he thought there must be blood mixed with the water by now, it was coming from so deep inside him. Of course, he hoped it wasn’t, but he couldn’t look yet. He would just have to slog through this and come out the other end.
And hope that everything else doesn’t.
An impatient sigh sounded from above him, and then someone crouched beside him and cast a spell Harry couldn’t hear; it was nothing more than a murmur from beside his ear. Harry screamed as his lungs seemed to turn themselves inside out and more water than he had realized existed leaped from between his lips in a painful fountain. He sagged down until his face touched the ground and opened his mouth. He wanted to moan, but he didn’t have the strength even for that.
"The Summoning Charm still works, thank Merlin," Snape said, in the detached voice he had used when someone asked a non-stupid question in Potions class. "Come here, Potter. I don’t fancy trying to nurse you and take care of my tasks at once." Harry was swung into the air and placed over a hunched, scrawny shoulder that he suspected Snape was deliberately trying to make as uncomfortable as possible.
"You could have warned me about the fucking kelpie," Harry said, or tried to say. The words made him cough, and that made his ribs hurt, and his body began to heave, forcing out more water. Snape’s Summoning Charm, predictably, hadn’t worked completely.
Blackness was creeping back in, unwanted, uninvited, but still there. Harry still heard Snape’s answer, though.
"I did warn you about it, Potter. That was Bellatrix’s Horcrux."
Part Two.
