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World in Pieces	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 16431 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
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Chapter Nineteen—Magnificent Plans

            “But would he really do something like that?” Harry whispered. He felt as if he were drowning in air. He knew he was breathing, he could even hear it in his ears, but none of it seemed to get into his lungs.

            With a gasp, he tore himself away from the sensation and whirled around to face Snape. “Would he really do something like that?” he repeated. “Kill the original Harry here just because he didn’t think he could defeat Tom and wanted to bring someone from another world?”

            Snape’s eyes darted away from him to Draco, and Harry winced and turned back to see Draco pale and green at the same time. Harry had seen the same look on Dudley’s face when he ate too many sweets. He mumbled an apology. So maybe that was what Snape was hinting Dumbledore had done, but Harry didn’t need to blurt it out like that in the face of someone who had loved the original Harry.

            “If that’s the truth, that’s the truth,” Draco whispered, and folded his arms over his stomach, and looked up with a grim little smile. “You didn’t promise me a comforting answer. How can we prove it, though?”

            “I do not think he intended to slaughter Harry to bring in versions of you from other worlds.”

            Harry turned back to Snape, glad that he had someone to look at besides Draco right now. “But what else would he have wanted to sacrifice Harry for? Or convince him to sacrifice himself for?” He wondered if he would have to consider the issue of Horcruxes after all, if maybe Dumbledore had thought the original Harry was the only Horcrux and they could kill Voldemort if they just killed him.

            There was still something horrible about forcing potions down Harry’s throat to make him agree to it. And slicing his throat with his own wand.

            Harry’s churning sickness had changed form, though. He was angry enough to feel as though he’d swallowed the big geode they were talking about making into a reverse Horcrux for Voldemort, and now it was squatting in his stomach.

            I’ll get justice for you even if no one else wants to. Even if no one else can.

*

            Severus watched the flame spring to life in Harry’s eyes, and the subtler ways he had thought of phrasing it died. No, Harry would not accept the small platitudes Severus had wanted to try.

            The gentleness was partially for Draco’s sake—he had heard enough harshness this morning—but still more for Harry’s. Dumbledore had been far more to him in his own world than he was here. If Severus could keep Harry from suffering a last twinge of betrayal, he thought the effort would be worthwhile.

            But this flame didn’t demand coddling. This flame demanded answers. And Severus bowed his head and gave the answers he had to give.

            Or the ones he thought he did. Behind his surface thoughts whispered the bottom ones that said he could be, he might always be, wrong.

            “I heard nothing about the spell to summon another version of you from other worlds until the first Harry was dead,” Severus said. “And it requires enormous time and effort, and the help of other people, the whole Order. I do not think Albus would have turned to that if he had any choice whatsoever—in his own mind. That means it was a second best choice.”

            Harry grunted and folded his arms so tight that he looked as if he would start to spin like an enraged house-elf. “Fine. But what purpose does the sacrifice serve, then?”

            “He adored the original Harry,” Severus said bluntly, and then felt his lips twitch despite himself as he saw the way Draco lifted his head. “No, not the way you did, Draco. But he was almost proud of him for being Slytherin, and still someone he could admire. His genius and talents for making friends, all the things that did not endear him to you when you first heard about him, Harry, were traits that Dumbledore ever cultivated or coveted.”

            Harry kept his eyes fixed on Severus’s face, and mouthed the words instead of speaking them. Get to the point.

            Severus nodded, but continued at his own pace. Just as someone needed to know all the ways that Potions ingredients might or might not interact in order to comprehend why a brewing would succeed or fail, Harry would not understand what Severus feared Albus had done if he did not understand the original Harry’s relationship to Albus. “He thought, however, that that very brilliance made him unfit to face the Dark Lord. He talked about it often. How challenges didn’t seem to touch Harry deeply enough, that he floated above everything and achieved it too easily.” He broke off when he saw an expression in Harry’s eyes that had to be addressed. “What?”

            Harry shook his head. “Nothing. I just realized something about the Dumbledore from my world that I didn’t want to think about.”

            “What?” Severus took a step forwards.

            “I said, I don’t want to think about it,” Harry said, and glared at him.

            Severus paused, then nodded shortly. He would not let the notion go forever, only until Harry did feel like talking about it, but he respected that not enough people had listened to Harry when he asked them to back off. “Fine. Albus did not think Harry hardened enough. But he also believed in the prophecy, and believed that Harry was the only one who could face the Dark Lord.”

            “I still don’t see how a sacrifice was a solution to that problem,” Harry said, barely moving his lips this time.

            Severus grimaced. “I think that he believed, if someone could kill the original Harry in—such a way—then that original person might be able to take his place in the prophecy. Take on the original Harry’s importance, as it were. Absorb the sacrifice’s power, which is an ancient motive for such acts. He would be the one to face the Dark Lord, that way, and Harry would not have to.”

            Harry said nothing. Draco was the one who began to laugh, the jagged sounds like glass shards poking out of his throat.

            “He loved him,” he gasped, scrubbing at his face, although Severus could see no tears there. It was more as though he wanted to scrub his old beliefs in the righteousness of Albus Dumbledore out of existence, and thought doing that would help. “So he killed him to make sure that he didn’t have to face the Dark Lord? Death was kinder than—than death, or even battle with a chance that he’d survive?”

            “I believe that is what happened, based on the admittedly scanty evidence we have,” Severus said. He reached over and clasped Draco’s shoulder once, hard, before he let go. Draco gasped and shook and got his composure back with a stiffening of his neck so hard that Severus worried about his vertebrae. He studied Draco as he spoke to Harry. “It is what Albus did to spare himself, rather than Harry, though he would have rationalized it to himself the other way. It was after the boy’s death that he tried to launch mortal spells at the Dark Lord.”

            “He said he’d tried,” Harry whispered. Where Draco’s voice was jagged, Harry’s was dry, and he stepped close to Severus with burning eyes, surveying him as if he wanted to choke someone and Severus might do in a pinch. “Tried to kill Tom, and found that mortal spells were deflected every time. And he seemed pretty sure about what someone could and couldn’t do if they were part of the prophecy.”

            Severus inclined his head. “The prophecy has always been the greatest stumbling block to Albus’s perception of the world, I believe. He worried over it to me and Minerva, many times, when he saw how Harry acted and believed that he might not be hard enough to defeat the Dark Lord. He told us that he wished he could take Harry’s place, but the prophecy itself would not permit it. I know that they can warp the world, people’s decisions, actions, in pursuit of coming true, and often come true in unexpected ways. Albus apparently believed that it could not be defeated, but could be bent. If someone else stepped into Harry’s place, then the Dark Lord might truly die.”

            “Harry would have killed him,” Draco muttered rebelliously, head bent low. Then he looked around the room as though someone had scolded him and added, “My Harry.”

            “Maybe,” Harry said, and turned back to Severus. “But instead, what happened is that Dumbledore couldn’t do anything, and he started to think that no one except a real Harry Potter could defeat Volde—Tom. So he started summoning other mes from other worlds.”

            Severus spread his hands. “I know the course of action, and yes, after he had tried to kill the Dark Lord himself is when he told us that we needed to use the Dream Mirror and the summoning spell. Whether I have pinpointed his train of thought successfully, I do not know.”

            “It sounds reasonable to me.” Harry said.

            Severus didn’t miss the way that Harry’s hand fell briefly to rest on the pocket where he kept his wand. The wand that was so much more powerful than it should be, that was so adept at casting Dark magic.

            But now was not the best time to confront Harry about it, and Severus had to wonder, the more he saw about Harry, what would be gained by doing so. If he remained close to Harry, he could change things if Harry became unacceptably Dark. If he protested the ways Harry chose to defend himself, he was more likely to find himself exiled from Harry’s company, and the chance to help or observe him.

            “But I have no idea how to spin it into a trap for Albus,” Severus said, bringing the conversation back to the topic they had been discussing, long ago, back before Harry decided to bring in the evidence that it had been murder.

            “I think I may.”

            And he does, too, Severus thought, watching the way Harry lifted his head, his green eyes gone clear instead of dark, once more. Here was the leader he could follow, because he didn’t ask for followers but offered something—confidence, a plan, courage—that would attract people in spite of themselves.

            Draco stood against the wall, his arms folded. Severus did not think he need worry about him for the moment; Draco did not seem as if he would run out and do something foolish, and that had been Severus’s immediate concern. He probably needed time to absorb the revelations about the man he had followed and the boy he had loved.

            So Severus was free to do what he really wanted, turn to Harry and ask, “And what is this plan?”

*

            Harry hesitated a moment, wondering if he should ask Snape to make Draco leave the room, and then shook his head. At the moment, they had probably bound Draco closer to their side than anyone else. He wouldn’t betray them if he thought there was a chance for vengeance on Dumbledore.

            “We threaten to expose his secret,” he said.

            Snape waited, and then leaned towards Harry and gave him an unimpressed look. Harry had to grin. That look would have infuriated him if he saw it on the face of the Snape back in his world, but it didn’t here.

            “Yes, but that is not a plan,” Snape said. “It does not tell us how or where.”

            “How is pretty simple, I think,” Harry murmured, spinning the shaft of the Elder Wand between his fingers. “I send him an owl telling him that I know the truth, with just enough mentions of the word ‘sacrifice’ to make him panic. And then I send him another one, perhaps after giving him a chance to reply to me, taunting him with the fact that you’ve escaped and now he has no lever to use against me, telling him I despise him as much as I do Volde—Tom, and that I plan to announce the truth to the Order. I thought about having you write to him, but he would never believe that you’d be that impetuous.”

            “He would not believe that, no,” Snape murmured, and for some reason raised a hand to his mouth to conceal his lips.

            Harry watched him, but since Snape didn’t burst out laughing, Harry felt free to continue. “So, then I send out owls to the Order, making it seem as if I’m really going to announce that, although I won’t tell them anything clear enough to let them guess the truth. The letters will just get them really, really confused and excited.”

            “Why wouldn’t you tell them the truth?” Draco demanded, leaning in from the side as though he was going to pounce on Harry and strangle him with his bare hands. Harry had to look at him with approval, though. At least it wasn’t slumping against Harry and moaning that he would never love anyone again. “They deserve to know it. They’ve followed him.”

            Harry nodded. “And except for you and McGonagall, who took the chance and came with Snape, I don’t know who followed him out of fear and feels guilty about it now, and who really supports him. Not to mention that there could be a traitor in the Order who’s telling everything to Grey-Skin. I’ll make the announcement. But it’s not going to be in those letters.”

            “You want to lure Dumbledore out to a certain specific place,” Snape murmured. “Because more than anything, he would want to prevent exposure of that secret, and whether he intercepts the owls you send to the Order or not, he will have to go.”

            Harry nodded. “He might not catch all of the owls. And he would worry that I had some other way to reach them, especially since two of them have abandoned his cause to come with you.”

            Snape smiled, a vicious expression that Harry didn’t think he should have to keep covered. “You do have another way to reach them, should you want it.”

            “That spell you told me about casting on Sirius?” Harry asked.

            Snape nodded. “It enables me to control his actions from a distance. But the courses of action suggested will come to him as dreams—not in his actual dreams, which could be watched, but with the same feeling—and he will believe that he has only had nightmares about them, not done them. He could get word to anyone you are willing to take a chance on.”

            Harry chewed his lip. He felt he should balk, really. That spell sounded fairly horrible.

            But this wasn’t his Sirius, and he had attacked Snape as they were leaving Hogwarts, and even if everything about it was a misunderstanding, Harry couldn’t take a chance on Sirius any more than he could on the rest of them.

            “All right,” Harry said. “We’ll have Sirius reach them, then. And we’ll lure Dumbledore into the trap. Even if the rest of the Order comes with him and they all fight on his side, it won’t matter,” he added, stealing the objection that he saw Snape opening his mouth to make.

            “Why not?” Snape asked the question as though Harry was the one at fault for not making the answer obvious.

            Harry smiled. “Because Tom is going to be there, too.”

*

            Arrogant. But less Dark than I feared.

            Perhaps, Severus thought a second later, he should be fearing for the sanity and stability of his own brain, that that was his first reaction to what Harry proposed, instead of immediate rejection.

            “You cannot lure him the same way you would Dumbledore,” he said. “His attacks on Hogwarts show that he wants the Order dead, but he may not know that you have left. He still wants to kill you as well. And he will have no guarantee that you are at a particular place at any moment in time.”

            Harry nodded calmly. “Yeah, but I’m not going to give him a choice.”

            Severus didn’t close his eyes and rub his forehead, but only because Draco was in the room, and Severus had no intention of looking that weak before him, temporary ally or not. “All right. Explain to me why.”

            Harry tapped his scar. “We know that he can connect with me along this—or by the prophecy, or something,” he added, when Severus narrowed his eyes at him. “I’m going to go along the bond and enrage him. Make him want to kill me right then and there. Even though he’s sane, I don’t think that’ll be very difficult to do.”

            “What is to keep him from destroying you in the grounds of his own mind?” Severus asked, suspecting that he would regret this answer even more.

            Harry beamed at him. “I rather thought you could do that.”

*

            Snape was pale enough that Harry wanted him to sit down. But he wouldn’t do it in front of Draco—caught speechless and staring with his mouth open—and Harry understood that. So he continued plowing ahead, laying out the whole plan. He might as well. Snape wasn’t going to react any better to any of the rest of it.

            “So we enrage him, and let it slip—as if we didn’t want him to know, but it got out anyway—that we think Dumbledore is the real threat, and we’re going to meet him at such and such a time and place. So both Tom and Dumbledore will show up at the same time, and I think Tom is capable of destroying Dumbledore. And we know the method that we’re going to use to destroy Tom.”

            Snape shook his head slightly. “Albus knows that none of his fatal spells can touch the Dark Lord. That fact has of late been central to his whole existence, if my theory of why he had the Harry born to this world sacrificed is correct. What is to keep him from Apparating away the instant he realizes who is there?”

            Harry winced. He hated to say this, but he didn’t really have any choice about the place to confront Dumbledore and Voldemort, either. “Because the will of the master of Shaldon’s Garden will keep him from doing it.”

            Snape looked at him long enough that Harry wondered if he was simply going to explode. Then he turned to Draco and pointed at the door.

            Draco backed up a few steps, swallowed, and bolted out the door. Snape waved his wand, and the door locked itself after him. Then he looked at Harry, and Harry understood why Draco had walked away without making a fuss, even though he obviously wanted to know as much about their plans to get vengeance for his Harry as possible.

            “I told you what this place means to me,” Snape said softly. “What it could mean. The reasons that I gave you access. None of that has changed.”

            “I know,” Harry said quietly. “But you’ve also given access to the Weasleys and the rebels and other people who could potentially betray you, not just me.” Snape sneered at Harry when he mentioned the rebels, but even if he had never precisely given Golden and the rest permission to come, he hadn’t revoked Harry’s permission. “And believe me, everyone who would have an incentive to betray your secrets is either going to be dead or Obliviated in the end. Including any Order members who come with Dumbledore.”

            Snape blinked. “You want to kill them?”

            “Yes, I thought I would just leave Tom alive behind me when I’m trying to return to my own world,” Harry snapped. “That sounds like a wonderful plan!”

            “That’s not what I meant,” Snape said slowly. “You are willing to see the death of Albus, when you saw it once already? When he was your mentor and someone at least important to you, if not all-important, in your old world? You are willing to condemn these versions of your godfather and your friends to death?”

            “They aren’t my godfather, and they aren’t my friends,” Harry said bitterly. “I learned that by experience, thanks.”

            Snape remained still. Harry hadn’t answered his question, and they both knew it.

            Harry sighed and rubbed his face. “I don’t know who will come with Dumbledore, if anyone does, so it’s hard to be sure. But you could command Sirius to stay behind, and even to delay Ron and Hermione. And I’m hoping that they could just be Obliviated about the location of Shaldon’s Garden and what really happened, not killed.” He looked up and held Snape’s eyes. “But if they come, they risk dying in battle. The same risk all the rebels and the Weasleys and McGonagall and Draco and the two of us take, too.”

            “I want something.”

            Harry blinked. He had expected—well, something else, he thought. More arguments, maybe. Certainly sneers and demands to know how Harry could ask Snape to betray the one secret he had kept for years, even from Dumbledore. But not this quiet tone, not this intense look.

            “What can I give you?” he asked, and hoped that he didn’t sound as desperate and hopeless as he felt. “If you kick me out, if you stop helping me, then I’m not going to win. I don’t even know how to make the reverse Horcrux that we need to defeat Tom.”

*

            Severus felt a bleak smile pulling at his mouth, one that he could not give way to, because it would probably confuse Harry, or at least convince him that Severus was losing hope or going mad.

            But what Severus wanted to say was, Even bereft of my help, you would find some way.

            For the moment, he could best the impulse to smile simply by thinking of what Harry was asking him to sacrifice. If he revealed Shaldon’s Garden, then he would lose it. Either way. He did not really believe that they could defeat Albus and the Dark Lord both at once, or that both would attack each other instead of Harry, if all three of them were in the same place. But on the other hand, there were different levels, different folds of wizardspace, in the garden. It might be that he could enfold the winner in a level that would allow him no way out.

            Perhaps. Severus had never made that kind of demand on the house’s wards, had never wanted to. It was always meant to be his secret bolthole, the one paradise that he could flee to should the demands of one master, and then the other, become intolerable.

            On the other hand, perhaps he had lost it the moment he revealed its existence as a place to house Harry.

            He did not try to explain everything he thought. Chances were that Harry had already anticipated most of it, and he was going to ask anyway. The way he looked at Severus said as much.

            “If I allow them into my home,” Severus said, his voice low, precise, “if I let them into this place and they have the chance of destroying it, then I will lose everything here. And that may be true even if I survive and we manage to Obliviate the survivors. Memory Charms are not always strong enough to survive a determined assault, and members of the Order have good reason to be paranoid about a chunk of missing time that they cannot quite remember. They would not welcome me back.”

            Harry nodded. “But what do you want?”

            Harry was not a Slytherin—no Slytherin would have come up with the plan he had, without already having a bargaining piece in hand to offer another Slytherin—but he had cut to the heart of the matter like one. Severus paid him the compliment of speaking of it like a Gryffindor. “To come with you, back to your world.”

            Harry’s eyes were wide. Severus was doubly glad that he had not allowed Draco to remain. He knew Draco, he understood Draco, in some ways he esteemed Draco, but the boy was too critical of Harry right now for it to be a good idea to see Harry stunned.

            “You—you mean, that you really don’t want to stay here and hold the bridge and make sure that I get back home safely?” Harry finally asked.

            Of course he would see it that way. Because what about his life has so far trained him not to expect the worst? “I want to go with you because I do not want to be in a different place than you,” Severus said. “Because there is nothing for me here, with all my former friends either dead, Death Eaters, or devoted to Dumbledore. Because I know that there is a place for me in your world, that I did not survive there, and thus can drop into the gap. Because I want the future, and not to stay and brood on the past, which is what the Order will do even if Dumbledore survives and the Dark Lord dies.” He grimaced. Speaking like a Gryffindor was exhausting. No wonder that Harry had the vast reserves of energy that he did. “Does that answer your question?”

*

            Harry licked his lips. Because, yes, it did, and he had been wrong to assume that Snape feared holding the bridge, or hated Harry, or anything else that his mind had automatically jumped to.

            But still, he had no idea who would hold the bridge and even make their escape possible if Snape came with him.

            Perhaps Draco, though. Perhaps McGonagall. McGonagall had sat in on the rebel plan to sting Voldemort in the side, but she had looked desolate, since the plan was too far advanced for her to add any special Transfiguration skills to the mix. Perhaps she would accept this, as something she could do that would contribute to both Snape and Harry escaping and living happy, successful lives in another world.

            “I—you really want to come with me?” Harry asked, and then bit his lip, hard, because it was a childish thing to say.

            Snape just nodded, in a way that suggested he was relieved, after all, that Harry had asked the question. “I do.”

            Harry licked his lips again. “Then—you didn’t have to ask for it as a bargain, you know. You just could.”

            Snape’s face tightened. “And you did not have to ask for the use of Shaldon’s Garden, either, when you know what this place is to me.”

            “I had to,” Harry said, tapping his foot. He hated it when Snape was unreasonable, especially because this version of the bastard was intelligent most of the time. “You know it’s the only place where we could have a chance of them meeting and not being able to Apparate away or fight their way out immediately. You know.”

            “I need to ask for what I am asking exactly as much as you needed to ask for Shaldon’s Garden.”

            Harry gave up on getting that to make sense. It probably wouldn’t, no matter how much he questioned Snape, and at the moment, he wasn’t really looking forward to doing so. He switched tactics instead. “Say that I agree to let you come with me. Are you sure that we can get someone to hold the other end of the bridge, and even make this possible? And do you even have an object that you can leave behind as an anchor, the way Hermione said you had to?”

            “I do not know.” Snape looked so unruffled that Harry had to stare at him. This was the man who had looked as if he was going to strike like a cobra not five minutes ago. “I assume that we will need to contact your friend again and ask her questions.”

            Harry nodded. “And in the meantime, we need to go through with the rebel plan, I need to write back to Dumbledore and get the second letter ready to send, we need to start figuring out how you can protect me with Occlumency when I talk to Tom and what I’m going to say to him, you need to figure out what portions of Shaldon’s Garden you’re going to put Dumbledore and then Tom in when they arrive…”

            “If we go through with your mad plan,” Snape said sharply. “You did not ask whether I had managed to come up with something better.”

            Harry paused and looked at him inquiringly. “Did you?” He had to admit that, while he felt like his plan was the only one that would work, Snape knew both Dumbledore and Voldemort better than Harry did and might have come up with something else.

            “No,” Snape said. “But you could have asked.”

            Harry smiled in spite of himself. “I could have, right. I’m sorry. And in the meantime, you have your bargain. If you let me use your home to trap them, then you can come with me back to my own world.” Let me phrase it like that if it’ll please that crazy Slytherin brain of his.

            Snape nodded once, fast, as though to conceal the expression on his face, but nothing could exactly hide the pleased narrowing of his eyes, and Harry grinned.

*



            “What do you think? Is that a masterpiece or what?”

            Severus picked up the letter that Harry had written to Albus and scanned it carefully. He did not think it would have worked if coming from any of the other Harrys, the Slytherin ones; it did not suit them, and Albus was very careful of nuance like that. But Harry, a Gryffindor, he knew less well than any of the others.

            And this…this might serve.

            Dear Albus Dumbledore, the letter began, after enough crumpling and shadows of ink that it made it seem as if Harry had tried to come up with some more insulting name to call him by,

            You should know by now that Snape escaped from you, you arrogant bastard. So you have nothing left to bargain with. I know that you never intended to send me back to my world. That was just a story that you made up while you either searched for a way to bring another Harry Potter through, or a way to control me completely and destroy my mind. Snape is completely on my side now, and he told me everything that you said to him.

            I don’t have any reason to like or trust you. All you’ve done is destroy my life since you brought me here, and now you’re trying to destroy me, too. I don’t have any reason to come back to you. All I really want is revenge on you. And if you’re going to try and kill me, then I need to take my revenge before then.

            I found out something, though. Something that’s going to make up for all the things you tried to do to me, and the things that you did to the original Harry and the other Harrys that you summoned from their worlds to come here.

            Does the word ‘sacrifice’ mean anything to you?

            I don’t know, but it might mean something to a whole bunch of other people.

            Harry Potter.

            Severus lowered the letter and looked at Harry, who was striding up and down the room with his body practically vibrating with energy. “Well, really,” he said. “I thought you were to leave mention of my escape until the next letter.”

            Harry turned around and grinned at him. “Well, yeah, I did think about that. I mean, I thought I was going to do that when I first came up with the plan. But I decided that it’s been too long, and either you would have come back to me by now or you would still be wandering and I wouldn’t have any idea what happened to you. Either way, it would make sense for me to brag that I have you back.”

            Severus smiled faintly. “I can see traces of the traits that would have put you into Slytherin, perhaps,” he said.

            Harry shrugged and plowed ahead with what Severus knew was the more important part of the plan. “Do you think we should send it out the way it is? Or can you suggest changes?”

            “Any changes I could suggest would be to make it more subtle and nuanced,” Severus said dryly, putting the letter down beside him. “And that’s the last thing you want.”

            Harry laughed at him. Severus was glad that he had come this far, able to see a sincere laugh. “What do you think is most important to do now?” Harry asked, picking up the letter. “After we find one of the rebels’ owls, of course. Start work on the reverse Horcrux, or the Occlumency protection, or should we go ahead with that attack the rebels have already planned on Tom?”

            “The work on the reverse Horcrux cannot be done quickly,” Severus cautioned him. Harry turned around fully to give him a long, slow look, and Severus nodded and said, “I know you know that. What I mean is that it is better broken into discrete steps than done all at once, in a rush.”

            “In a rush and quickly are the same things,” Harry muttered, but he turned around and walked over to the trunk that he’d put the geode in before he and Severus descended the stairs to talk with Heron and Draco. “Fine. What kinds of spells do we need to do to bind his life-force to this?” He looked expectantly at Severus.

            Severus waved his wand over the geode before he responded. The stone glowed and sparked in response to the first spell, and did nothing when he cast the second. Severus stepped back, nodding. Despite the crack in the stone that showed the purple crystals, it was “whole” according to the spells, unbroken, without a flaw that would mean the magic would simply leak out again or refuse to take hold.

            “We need to do what is called a soul-tugging spell,” Severus said, and glanced at Harry, only to see him regarding Severus with a bright, solemn, owl-like glance. “That does not disgust you?”

            Harry only shrugged. “I know something about creating Horcruxes. I suppose it’s no more disgusting than murdering someone to split your soul and then attaching the soul piece to the Horcrux. How do we do it, though?”

            I should remember that he does not balk Gryffindorily at everything, either, even if he uses those traits to his advantage in deceiving Albus. “We must establish a connection to the Dark Lord’s soul,” Severus said, and pulled back the sleeve on his left arm.

            Harry closed his mouth and raised his eyes to Severus’s face, as if he had seen the Dark Mark so many times that he didn’t need to study it. Maybe he didn’t, at that, Severus had to admit. “I thought we would use my scar,” Harry said.

            “You share a connection of sorts, through Parseltongue,” Severus said, gesturing at him. “But you do not have the same connection that the Harry born to this world did, remember? And I am not sure that a connection between minds or magic is the same as a connection between soul and body.”

            “But how are you going to make the Dark Mark link to his soul, anyway?” Harry asked, eyeing it with distaste.

            Severus grimaced before he answered. He knew people who would have judged him for knowing this, though he supposed Harry was not one of them. “Because this Mark was important to him, formed out of his ambition and his desire for immortality and his lust for power and his passion for snakes and all the other things that make him up,” he said. “To begin the soul-tugging spell, I need only have an object of importance to him. It need not be one that is already connected to his soul.”

            Harry took a deep breath and stood up. “Then let me find an owl and send this letter off, and we’ll try.” He paused and stared at Severus. “Do you think he’ll notice when we start tugging on his soul?”

            Severus let his left sleeve fall back and stood up. “I suspect we will find out soon.”

            “Now who’s the Gryffindor?” Harry muttered, but he turned around and leaned out the door, yelling down the stairs for an owl.

            It was as well, Severus thought. He probably would not have understood the twitching smile, the lack of an insulted expression, on Severus’s face.

*

            unneeded: Albus did mean to cause it, if Severus is right about why he sacrificed Harry, but he thought he would take Harry’s place in the prophecy and the sacrifice would be for the greater good. Not so much.

            BAFan: Thank you!

            moodysavage: Thanks! I think Draco will recover, in time, as long as he listens to the reminders that this Harry is a different one from the one he loved.
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World in Pieces