FicWad

A/N Gaaah. I am... not entirely thrilled with this chapter.
/shrug.
If I indulged my perfectionism, I would never release any of my stories into the wild...

April 13th, 1997

It was a good thing that Harry hadn't developed an aversion to Polyjuice because she was operating under it right now. At least she was able to be a girl again, if only for a little while. It felt a little less awkward to move around, she thought.

She and Snape had gone to Diagon Alley to acquire a few books, most notably Prayers to Hoaxes, a collection of letters from the Sixteenth Century that had been referenced in some of the other Harry's notes as something to follow up if the chance ever arose. It seemed mostly mad to Harry when she flipped through it, but her counterpart had been keeping an eye out for a copy so into their stack it went.

With one hand she held a bag of books at her side. Her other, she kept close to her wand, opposite her enchanted stun baton.

What a silly name that was. Stun baton.

"Professor Snape, sir?"

"Yes, Harry?" He was examining a small bauble that they had acquired in a detour down Knockturn, a lapis lazuli star that aided mutual, consensual uses of legilimency. Like so many other things they had no idea if it would be useful, but more importantly they didn't know that it wouldn't and— this business being about minds to begin with— there was a sufficient possibility that it would.

"What is the hollow house?"

He looked at her. "I think that the most disconcerting thing about you is that you are not inclined to conduct your walking and your reading at the same time, let alone walking, read, and carrying on conversation with all those around you."

"Professor, you're changing the subject," Harry said. "It was in his notes. Several times."

"It is a very bad place."

"And that's all that you're gonna tell me?"

"Harry," Snape said slowly, "you called your headmaster the greatest wizard who ever lived."

"He is!" Harry confirmed proudly. "And more than that, if it were possible."

Snape cocked his head. "You're very close to him."

"Hufflepuff," Harry declared with as much pride as her last statement. "He's my friend."

"Why? Why does he deserve your loyalty?"

Harry glared at him. "He gave me everything. He's my mentor, he's my friend, he's… He's everything to me," she said softly.

"Then, as you would do for your headmaster, trust me when I say that there are some things that need to be left to themselves for now," Snape replied. "You're not ready yet."

His eyes were like broken steel, sharp and hard. They brooked no dissent.

"Okay."

This wasn't the end of it. She would make sure of that. But perhaps it was better to wait.

"How are you doing with the other students?" Snape asked.

"Alright. Ginny… I don't like lying to her." Harry sighed. "Or anyone else, really."

"But you mentioned Ginny first. The others were an afterthought. Why was that?"

In the distance, around a corner or two, something cracked. Like lightning.

"She trusts me. Well, she trusts your Harry, but that's who she thinks I am."

Like a small storm.

Snape flicked his wand. "Harry!" He said, almost too low for her to hear. "There are anti-apparition wards set up here."

A side-along escape wasn't an option then. But that didn't matter much to her.

"You would just run away?"

Harry could hear brief screams and the crackle of fire.

"My mark is burning. Voldemort has come." Snape swallowed. "Several of him, and I fear I know which of them it is." He shrunk the gem in his hands and flicked his wand to do the same to her books. "Has Headmaster Riddle told you about winning battles at the cost of losing wars?"

She nodded.

"We need you and we need our Harry. We need the books that you have."

The tumult was growing closer, the sound of spellfire in the background, and Harry suddenly became aware of the oddity of their appearance, standing still and calm as other wizards and witches ran past them in panic.

Snape sighed. "You may be a Knight of Merlin's Order, but do not lose the war for us today."

"I won't."

He turned his head. "Then we will go. Answer my call to arms, heed my call to flee."

"Aye, captain."

"Then to arms, Miss Potter."

"To arms."

They ran or flew or charged like knights, Harry thoughts. Like agents of Britain's Authority, like Tonks and her Headmaster, or wizard-janissaries in those Araby films from the Seventies. Into the jaws of death, she thought, and she hoped only that they would fare better than the Light Brigade of old.

They went forth like knights, and as though they were Excalibur and Arthur's shield-breaker, so she held her wand and her stun baton.

There were three of them standing in the wreckage about them, all of them wretched and cruel and lean like starving wolves. One of them stood above the rest, skin patchy and discolored, rotting and in some places nearly falling off the bone. His wand was clutched tightly in a skeletal hand.

"Albus…" Snape whispered. "Albus Dumbledore."

Snape had told her that a horcrux had recently been made out of an inferius. She hadn't realized that the inferius was of Snape's predecessor.

"Wars and battles," Harry reminded him and then, noticing the look in his eyes, she nodded to herself and made her decision.

Let Snape take the others. She didn't know the dates, but she knew that Dumbledore hadn't been dead long enough for the scars to fade. There were strings that this horcrux could pull, but not against her. Dumbledore was only ancient history to her, dead before she was born.

"You idiot child!"

"Leave it to me, captain!"

In the corner of her eye she could see him grimace, but she could also see him turn to face another of the horcruxes. There was one that could not be seen at all save by the flurry of his spellwork and the destruction that was left in his wake. This one, Snape had told her once, was a soul bound in an invisibility cloak, possessing whatever hapless fool had been forced to don it.

Against a foe that he could not see but indirectly, the man held his ground remarkably well.

"Severus Snape!" roared a voice without a source. "You can't hide the taste of the Dark Mark from us! No matter what face you wear!"

Harry likened herself unto a dancer. She moved between strikes, in the spaces betwixt green death. With wands like blades, wands that wrote into the air like poison quills, she replied spell with spell, curse with curse. Spells that tore, spells that blasted, spells that called, blood to blood and bone to bone, and twisted or bit.

She could hear screams, and she could not distinguish hers from the horcruxes, nor theirs from Snape's.

"Little girl, little boy, tricky boy," the horcrux said. "I feel… your scar…"

Ah. That.

"Fuck you!"

The rejoinder of the century. Headmaster Riddle would be so proud of her.

She better make sure he never heard about it…

"Why your second wand, Harry?" he asked. "If that is what it is."

"Try it and find out!" she shouted. Her thrust only grazed his side— she wasn't used to an electric wand like this, one that needed forward contact like a spear— but his face twisted as her spell plugged into his body, twisted and molded by the electricity of her stun baton.

She was glad that inferi, or at least those that had been corrupted further by a horcrux, could feel some kind of pain. Some unpleasant sensation, whatever it was.

Further off, Snape continued to hold off the other two horcruxes. The third was gray and smooth-skinned where the inferius was putrid and disintegrating, like a lungfish in the shape of a sexless human figure. No nose, no ears, no mouth, and its only eye an electric blue orb that spun and spun like a lighthouse beacon. Knives hung from its side, but it made no attempt to use them.

According to Snape its soul resided in the orb, a prosthetic eye from an auror who died in the war against the original Voldemort. The battle that had led to it was fierce enough to have left no other survivors, and Voldemort had come out of it three fingers poorer than before. But the eye was worth it. The horcrux could see through enchantments, barriers, even invisibility cloaks. It was perhaps the main reason that the horcrux was able to keep its partners, and others, in line.

Snape was beginning to lose ground, though. If the assault from one was nearly too much, then both at once were overwhelming. He could only stave them off. And Harry could only remember that what he had told her was true.

But she would not cut and run.

"Reducto! Conjunctivis! Oppugno!" she shouted, running her stun baton along the ground and letting her magic channel into the dust beneath her feet. In a cloud she moved, a cloud that swirled around but away from her eyes and invaded his. "Expulso! Expulso!"

Her ears rang with the sound of the explosions.

"Oppugno!" More fragments rose from the ground, rubble and concrete shards that bashed and broke and sliced the inferius horcrux.

And in the distance, where she could not see, Snape fell. She could hear him, though, hear him shout in pain, hear the curse that brought him down, and then the one that disarmed him

"Professor Snape!"

She turned in time to hear the curse that cut his voice short, but she could not see it. All was dust, all was dust, she in the storm as much the inferius. But she was in the eye of the storm, she was the eye. She was the storm.

The other horcruxes wouldn't let her cut and run, but she didn't care. Let them come. And until they did, she would fall upon her original foe.

"Expulso!"

Past the dust that shielded her as much as it obscured her, she almost, almost was blinded by the blue light of her curse. Blasting curses followed. A flagrante curse turned the rubble searing hot. Then full-body binds and firestorm spells.

Harry moved in again, jabbing rather than slicing, and she could feel her magic skip inside her as her stun baton made contact with the inferius. As the circuit of her magic… completed, and not in herself.

"Expulso!"

Her magic, fused, accelerated, enhanced, supercharged… She let it all go through, let it run along the channels that she had carefully crafted into the stun baton, like she remembered doing with the very first electric wand that she had ever enchanted. Back when she was very young, when the headmaster's hand's guiding her own as they guided her wand for her.

The inferius was half a body, half a thing, blasted to shreds that could barely hang together. It fell where it had stood, armless, nearly legless, practically headless and almost without a single rib remaining to its frame. If it still held a soul, then it was still too broken to move. She could handle it later.

Harry turned to receive the other horcruxes, but they seemed not to have moved. Even the cloak horcrux she could detect, making out its footprints in the dust. The gray-skinned horcrux regarded her curiously, as Headmaster Riddle and Snape had both done so often, and it made several movements with its hands to the other horcrux.

The aberration returned its gaze to Harry and only stared. And then it moved again, and with one of its knives it tore a gash across its lower face to reveal rows of gnashing fangs, like a tunnel of gears pressing and grinding together.

"HaRrY PoTtEr…" it said. "So sTrAnGe. So dIfFeReNt tHaN I ReMeMbEr. LiTtLe GiRl." The wound, knitting itself even as the horcrux spoke, healed too far for the horcrux to continue talking, and it drew the knife across its face again. "I WiLl rEmEmBeR," it promised.

The wound, its mouth, resealed, and it made another series of hand signs to its partner before it raised its wand, presumably as the other did the same. A crack signaled its disappearance, and almost immediately there another as the other followed suit.

Harry half-walked, half-stumbled to where Snape lay, and let herself fall to her knees.

"I'm sorry, Professor Snape. I could have taken two. I should have taken two. I should have let us cut and run…"

Where was the glory here?

When the crack of lightning came again, when Filius placed his hand on her shoulder, she barely noticed at all. Just enough to confirm it wasn't a threat, and then she retreated into herself again.