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A Brother to Basilisks	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 85172 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 15
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Seventy-Six—Broken Connections

            For a long moment, she studied the broken pieces of red glass lying on the table. Then she glanced at the parchment of the letter that had come yesterday.

            And nodded, standing.

            Elena Zabini walked over to the window in her tower and leaned her elbows for a moment on the sill. Outside was a softly pretty grey day, with clouds reflecting pale light back to the ground and slushy snow still lying in trampled ruts where she’d spent the day galloping on the back of one of her palomino horses. Elena watched it and waited for her breathing to slow. She couldn’t be agitated when she executed her revenge. Nothing could go wrong.

            The poison she had chosen depended as much on intention and will as it did on the right combination of ingredients in the cauldron.

            And she had made her decision. She went back to the letter and wrote a reply, not bothering to clean up when the quill spluttered a little and some ink got blotted onto the parchment. This was as much a symbol of her unshakeable determination as the decision she’d undertaken.

            Professor Snape,

            I accept your bargain. I will need an hour alone with Jordan Damirini before the trial to execute my revenge. In return, I will send you the broken shards of the artifact you requested and the book on Parseltongue that my son gave me last year.

            Elena.

            She turned, and the owl was already coming through the window, drawn by her indomitable will. She held out the letter and said softly, “Deliver it to Severus Snape.”

            A snap. A flex of the owl’s beak, and it was gone, soaring straight out the window like an arrow shot at the heart of an enemy. Elena waited until that rush of energy had departed, and the next one was coming at her, curling at the top like an oncoming wave.

            From now until the brewing of the poison was finished, she thought as she turned towards the small cabinet that housed her jewelry collection, she would be racked and bounced from wave to wave. It was the price for the poison she had chosen to brew. Nothing would be left to chance. She would ride the waves or she would die.

            But she would have the revenge she had wanted.

            Elena smiled slightly as she took out the sapphires she would need to crush and powder, and the silver chain that would bear her whispered curse for her great-uncle. It was a smile that no one but her son had ever seen.

            Well, Elena decided as she held up the silver chain in the nearest mirror to study the fiddly clasp she would have to break, that’s not exactly true. He’s the only living person who’s ever seen it, though.

            And with that, she went to work.

*

            Severus waited in silence. Now and then, his hand went back to touch the parchment in his back pocket, the one that contained the answer Zabini’s mother had sent. He was grateful and relieved to know that they would not be working at cross-purposes.

            Now, he had someone else he needed to convince.

            At last Healer Lughborn came into the largest drawing room of Grimmauld Place and stood studying him. “He doesn’t want to see you,” he said.

            “But that’s not the same as saying that he won’t,” Severus murmured. While Lughborn was Light and explained what he wanted and what he didn’t straightforwardly, Severus had learned in the last weeks that he possessed a subtlety as great as any Slytherin’s.

            “Yes.” Lughborn hesitated once. “Speak exactly of what you came for and nothing else. Emphasize the danger to your ward. I think that’s the only way he’ll hear you.”

            Severus nodded and looked up at the doorway just as Black came through it. He halted when he saw Severus, his fingers flexing up and down on the wall. Then he shook his head and charged through the last few steps, the ones that carried him up to Severus.

            “I want to know what you have to say about Harry.” Black’s hair hung limp around his face, and his eyes were staring and mad in much the way they had been when he emerged from prison.

            “The Dark Lord confronted him in his mind,” Severus said, heeding Lughborn’s advice and not glancing away from Black’s eyes, even though, standing like this, so close, their gaze was uncomfortably intimate. “When Dash defended him, the poison he sent into the Dark Lord’s dream-image somehow seeped back and affected Harry. We saved Harry. But I need to know what kind of connection there is between Harry and the Dark Lord. What would make the poison do that?”

            Black staggered and sat down. Since there was no chair or couch nearby, he simply sat on the floor. Lughborn stirred, but didn’t move nearer when Black covered his mouth with one hand and began to choke out laughter.

            This is him when he’s being Mind-Healed? Severus stood still and affected the slightly bored expression he had created long ago when he first had to sit through professors’ meetings at Hogwarts. Inwardly, he was appalled. I did the right thing in taking Harry away from him, however much capacity he has to heal or however much they missed each other.

            When Black had ceased to laugh, he looked up and said conversationally, “I knew that basilisk was trouble. Of course the poison would affect him. Harry shouldn’t be bonded to a snake.”

            “We must deal with the reality in front of us,” Severus said, in the same tone he had once used when Pomona made complaints about so few of her Hufflepuffs passing Severus’s Potions class. “The reality is that Dash and Harry have this bond and don’t wish to break it. What is the nature of the connection between Potter and the Dark Lord?”

            “Their bond is horrible. Harry wouldn’t nearly have died if not for it!”

            “He would still have the Dark Lord after his head. What is the nature of the connection?”

            Black choked and looked away. Severus remained standing still. He caught the expression of approval on Lughborn’s face, even as he nodded slightly. Apparently he thought Severus was acting as he should with Lughborn’s crazy patient.

            Finally, Black whispered, “I promised Dumbledore I wouldn’t tell. It’s horrible. And it would kill any hope Harry has to survive the war, once he knows about it.”

            “Is it a connection that can only be severed by death?” That would at least eliminate some of the candidates Severus had been thinking of, although it might not give them a lead on which one of the remaining ones it was.

            Black looked up, shading his eyes as if Severus shone with a light. “No. I don’t think so,” he added. “I’ve been trying to find rituals that would let me save Harry without death. But someone interfered in my research and the Black books that only Narcissa can show me.” He lowered his hands to his lap and gave Severus a freezing look this time.

            Don’t respond to accusations, Lughborn had told Severus, and he didn’t. “Then what are the kinds of rituals that would sever it?”

            Black hesitated. Perhaps he thought giving up that information wouldn’t reveal the secret. “The kind that would take something vital from someone else and substitute for the bit in Harry that’s tied to You-Know-Who,” he finally said.

            Severus narrowed his eyes. The vague category covered a great many rituals, from blood rituals that might allow the Dark Lord to return to a body to ones that would heal a wizard dying of a mortal wound or poison. They were the kind of rituals Severus might have had to use on Harry if Dash had not been able to turn back his own poison.

            But the connection between the Dark Lord and Harry couldn’t be as simple as Harry having sucked away the Dark Lord’s life force. Why would he do that? Harry had been a one-year-old baby at the time, and even if Lily had had something to do with the Dark Lord’s defeat, Severus had known her too well to think she would ever engage in a life-stealing ritual. Especially not when the participant in the ritual had to be a fully conscious, knowing being. To perform such magic on a child…no, Lily had not been so Dark.

            “What is vital?” he asked Black.

            Black only stared back at him with no comprehension for a moment, and then smiled and wagged his finger at Severus. “You won’t get me with that, Snape,” he said. “You won’t trick me into telling you the truth.”

            “No,” said Severus, and ignored the warning motion he saw from Lughborn in the corner of his eye. “I would not stoop to that. I do want to know if you will simply tell me what is wrong with Harry, so we can heal him.”

            Black sat upright. “You said that he was healed! Is he still dying of the poison? I’ll kill that basilisk myself!”

            The last words were almost a bark, and Severus thought he saw some of Black’s stubble becoming fur. He stood still instead of moving, and held the man’s eyes, and said very softly, “If you killed Dash, Harry would also die. No. Harry is well right now. But he cannot be permanently healed if we do not find out the nature of the connection between him and the Dark Lord, and destroy it.”

            “That’s what I was trying to do.” Black sank back on the floor, human again.

            “But you will not tell me what the connection is. You only wanted to ruin it.” Severus saw the way Lughborn frowned at him, and held back his hatred and the words he wanted to use to voice it. If Black was this bad after weeks of working constantly with Lughborn, then Severus could only imagine what he must have started out like.

            On the other hand, perhaps he was only this bad because of the threat to Harry. Severus knew he had not been himself for several hours after Harry had nearly died of Dash’s poison.

            Severus considered Black with that in mind, and chose a different path. “Have you found a safe ritual yet?”

            Black flushed and glanced away.

            Severus nodded. “Until you find one, or until you decide to trust the other people who care for Harry—and the snakes who do—then we can never be sure of destroying that connection. You’ve done months of research, without finding a ritual that would satisfy the requirements.” He turned and took the chair that stood nearest the door, studying Black across the slight distance he’d opened between them. “The answer might not be in the books your ancestors collected. I think, sooner or later, that you need to face that.”

            Black gestured with one hand, snarled with one side of his mouth, but otherwise stayed silent and motionless. Lughborn hadn’t set a limit on the amount of time Severus could be here, so he remained still, eyes slit and watching.

            “Dumbledore trusted me with it,” Black finally whispered. “And look what you did to him.”

            Severus held back the gasp, too. He said only, when he thought he could make the words as flat and neutral as possible, “He was the one who chose to parade as Moody and ‘test’ Harry with his spells, as well as enter his name in the Tournament. I cannot be sorry that Harry and Dash exposed him. What he did after that was up to him.”

            “That damn basilisk!” Black exploded fast enough that Severus had his wand in hand before he thought about it. But Black was on his feet, pacing and snarling again, and hadn’t paid attention to the way Severus reacted. “He messes everything up!”

            “The fact that you don’t think Dumbledore’s plans were the problem…” Severus broke off. He couldn’t think of a word bad enough to describe Black.

            Black turned and glared at him, reminded that Severus was here, evidently. “If you’d left Dumbledore to play them through, he might not have screwed them up! No one trusted him enough. They just found out what he was doing and attacked him without giving him the chance to explain.”

            “If you care more about Dumbledore than about Harry, I have nothing more to say to you.”

            Black paused. He touched his hair for a second with a trembling hand, then faced Severus. “Snape, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just—why does everyone trust a basilisk before they trust the man who saved them from Grindelwald?”

            “Because of what we are being asked to trust him with,” Severus said. Again Lughborn caught his eye and frowned, but he didn’t actually interfere, and this question, Severus thought he had an answer for. “If it was the safety of the school, I know few people who would trust Dash. But it isn’t. It’s Harry’s safety. And Dash cares more about him than Dumbledore did. You know that.”

            Black tilted his head, dog-like. But at least he was asking, so Severus didn’t feel the immediate, savage hatred that he would have otherwise. “But we can’t trust the basilisk either.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because no one except Harry can communicate with him.” Black swept back and forth like a tempest, pacing and waving his hands in the air. “How do we know what the bloody snake thinks or feels? Harry could misunderstand. The snake could feed him lies, and we would never know!”

            “Dash can, in fact, speak when he thinks it counts,” said Severus dryly, and Black turned and looked at him in utter surprise.

            “He can?”

            “He took over my body the other night and made me bring phoenix’s tears and antivenin for Harry. I heard his voice in my head. It was a—disconcerting experience.” Severus chose his words carefully, trying to walk along the edge of truth and yet not put things in terms that would make Black back off. “So if you really needed to understand him, he could do the same thing to you.”

            Black’s face contorted. “It sounds Dark. The same sort of power that drives the Imperius Curse.”

            “What’s more important to you,” Severus said, and didn’t care that his voice had grown cold, “saving Harry’s life and severing the connection that binds him to the Dark Lord, or being left to hate snakes and Slytherins in peace?”

Black stood still for so long a moment that Severus thought he would not answer. That would be typical of him, Severus thought in disgust. He will not make a decision; he forces others into making them for him.

Surprisingly, it was Lughborn who forced the issue. "Choose, Sirius," he said. "I fear that you have come as far as you can under my guidance unless you intend to turn back and abandon my help. I cannot make the decision for you."

Black lowered his head, shivering. "Who knows what you'll do with this?" he whispered, so low that Severus would not have heard him if not for the absolute silence in the rest of the room. Even the fire seemed to flicker into quietude. "Who knows what the bloody basilisk will do with this?"

"I can give you no reassurance I have not already given," said Severus, and his voice was calm and cold. Calmer than he had thought it would be, hearing Black casting blame on Severus, and Dash, and everyone except himself. "You will have to decide if you trust me based on that information, not anything else."

"Given what Dumbledore did..." Black trailed off.

Severus glanced at Lughborn. He only raised a hand, and Severus thought he probably wanted to see what Black would do as much as Severus himself.

Finally, Black whispered, "James would probably say it was the most daring thing I could possibly do," and raised his head. There was a sort of desperate commitment in his eyes that told Severus of the leap into space he was about to make--according to him. Severus still could not understand what Black wanted to keep concealed so badly, but he respected the desperation.

"All right. All right." Black closed his eyes and sat down again slowly. "This is something Dumbledore told me started suspecting in Harry's second year. He destroyed a diary then, right? A diary that had a piece of You-Know-Who in it?"

Severus started. "I had heard something about that, yes," he said slowly.

"He did," said Black, with a snap to the words that indicated what Severus could do with his doubt. "The diary had some kind of magic to it, obviously. It took Dumbledore a long time to work out what it was. At first he thought it was a more complicated kind of Pensieve, since it had a memory from fifty years ago."

Get to the point, Severus thought but did not say. On the other hand, perhaps understanding the path of discovery as Black had experienced it would allow Severus some insights into the process that Black had missed.

"But a memory wouldn't have been able to suck out life from someone else." Again Black shivered, and this time, Severus felt an echo of the shiver touch his own spine, like a foreshadowing of ice. "He eventually realized it was soul magic. The diary was a Horcrux. You've heard of them?" he asked abruptly, turning his head like a hunting hound.

Severus realized he must have gasped. He inclined his head, not taking his eyes from Black. "I am more than aware of what a Horcrux signifies, yes," he said.

            Black looked for a moment as if he would question how Severus knew, but then he shrugged and curled into himself. "So. Dumbledore started looking into You-Know-Who and the ways he'd messed around with soul magic. If he'd created a Horcrux, he could have done other things and left them lying around."

"Did he use a soul magic curse on Harry?" Severus asked quietly. The interaction of such powerful magic with Lily's love sacrifice could perhaps account for the Killing Curse bouncing, he thought. He hadn't considered it before because he had been unaware that the Dark Lord had walked the soul's path at all.

            "No. Worse." Black hesitated, and then made the final plunge, one that seemed to drench Severus, too, with freezing water. "He made Harry into an accidental Horcrux."

            Severus felt a curl of such intense disgust mount up inside his chest that he wanted to spit. And then he did, and could. He shook his head, closing one hand in front of him when Black started to open his mouth to speak. “No,” he whispered. “You misunderstood. You got something wrong. You are—you are wrong.”

            “No. That’s what Dumbledore told me, and he’d done more research than anyone else.” Black’s eyes were utterly convinced, in a way that told Severus that while Black might be a victim of Albus’s lies, he at least believed what he was saying. “No one else even realized that Harry might be a Horcrux. Albus is the one who found out. It proves everything, Snape. Why there’s a connection between Harry and Voldemort, and why he has Parseltongue when he was born into a family that’s not known for that, and why he survived—”

            “That it does not,” Severus interrupted, seeing the flaw in the logic and pouncing on it. He had never been so glad to see one, even in a Gryffindor essay. “If the Dark Lord made Harry into a Horcrux without meaning to, he still must have done it after the attack. A piece of soul must have been injected into Harry. But how could the piece of soul come loose without the Killing Curse rebounding onto the Dark Lord? It wouldn’t simply break loose because he walked into the room and confronted Lily.”

            Black paused, frowning, then gave a vague shake of his head. “You have me there, Snape.” His smile was twisted. “But there’s still no way that we can free him of it except by the Darkest of Dark rituals. And that’s what I’ve been looking up. And you’re free to hate me for it.” He glanced at Lughborn. “You, too. But Harry can’t live the way he is.”

            Severus took a step back from him. He thought he had been prepared for anything, perhaps, but this. Even for Black to be making it up. He had spent twelve years in Azkaban. He might be mad.

            It would be better if he had been mad.

            “I have my answer,” Severus told Lughborn, turning to face him and trying to ignore the way that Black had started to wheeze laughter. He sounded like someone losing blood. “I will leave now.”

            “Good. The Zabini boy will be safe among my kin.” Lughborn tilted his head towards Black for a moment and added in a tone that Severus thought was nicely judged to be too soft for Black to hear, “And it may be that the boy and his godfather will be reunited soon. Or not. For him to speak civilly to you is a bigger step than I thought him capable of taking.”

            But there’s still that laughter, Severus thought as he departed through the fireplace. And the fact that he thinks potentially killing Harry is the way to save him.

            I will not allow him near Harry again until I am sure that he is cured. And even then, I will come with Harry.

*

            “I need to speak to you, Mr. Potter.”

            Harry’s skin prickled. Snape had said that in a tone that dripped with heaviness at the edges. Even though he still called Harry “Mr. Potter” in public, so that part was normal, it wasn’t normal for him to sound anything but neutral when he did.

            “All right,” Harry said, when he could convince his throat to move and swallow. Snape nodded and turned away to supervise Crabbe and Goyle’s potion. He sounded like he usually did when he snapped at them.

            Harry looked down at Dash. What do you think it is? Some long-term consequence of the poison?

            It might be, said Dash. Or he might have found out how Voldemort can come into your dreams.

            Harry nodded slowly. His skin was prickling with dread and nervousness, and he paused to wipe sweat from his forehead more than once as he finished preparing the potion and then went to meet Snape.

            Draco caught his eye on the way out and mouthed, What is it? Harry could only shake his head back.

            If the news is as bad as we fear, Dash said gently, swaying along with his chin propped on Harry’s shoulder, then you should go to him soon, and take him up on his offer of comfort.

            Harry said nothing. His skin shone with sweat, and he had to fight to keep from bowing his head and throwing up.

            Dash wrapped him more firmly and fiercely, and said into the back of his mind, I’m here. Draco is here. Snape is here. Ron and Hermione are here. Even Draco’s father is here. You will be all right.

            And that, and that alone, gave Harry the courage to turn in his potion and go face Snape and his news.



*

            moodysavage: Because of Lughborn, and Harry, Snape preferred a gentler route. But he would have tried something else if it didn’t work.

            SP777: Well, I’m sorry for the picket line this chapter must have inspired! I was pretty sick last week, though, so this is late for a reason.

            Your first question can’t be answered yet; it would spoil a lot. As for the rest, Nagini is a Horcrux. And given that Harry has a basilisk, Voldemort has put a few protections on her.

            Amoral Lucey: Thank you!
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A Brother to Basilisks