Albus Dumbledore was genuinely, deeply angry. The artefact he had constructed from Snape's blood—into which he had poured so much time, effort, and money—was simply not working. As though the person it was meant to track did not exist in the world at all. Or at minimum, not on the Islands. Albus had sent enquiries to determine whether Snape had emigrated, but no wizard with even a remotely similar wand signature or magical aura had crossed any border.
What sort of creature killed my talented boy? And there's no finding them now. Though they could have, oh yes. He had looked into Augusta's memory, seen who had helped her tie up the cream of the Death Eaters. No, she couldn't have managed that alone—but Snape? That bookworm, that test-tube— turned out to be so formidable in combat? When had he, Albus, missed that?
Probably around the time the boy got his Mark. Interesting, who had taught him. And so gifted—what a loss, what a dreadful loss. Still, there was nothing to be done now.
Some comfort was provided by the briskly clicking beads in Harry's tracking artefact: alive. And everything proceeded to plan. The most important thing, at any rate.
He sighed, destroyed the remaining blood of the last of the Princes—it was no longer useful for anything, and there was no point cluttering up the storage room.
***
Since Harry would only accept food from Snape, the following scene had no witnesses.
"Kreacher cannot!" the house-elf shrieked hysterically, having received from the restored mistress Walburga the order to go and retrieve her son's body—and seemed prepared to beat his head against every available sharp surface, had Hagrid not caught him.
Andrei looked at Lady Black with quiet reproach.
"I hope you understand," he said, holding the carefully restrained house-elf in one fist, "that only he can help us reach your son's body. Do I need to teach you how to handle a key witness?"
"A what?"
The key witness, with a half-giant's thumb pressed neatly over his mouth, was thrashing his legs and producing muffled frantic sounds. Andrei narrowed his eyes.
"Tell him to be quiet and still."
"Does someone imagine they can give me orders?" Walburga hissed—she had fully recovered herself now. "You, you halfbreed, do you think that—"
The lady's tone grated on Andrei so badly that he finally lost patience.
"And you've decided your son doesn't deserve a proper burial? You'd rather nurse your pride while everyone rots—to what end? To destroy everything your ancestors built and tended and lived for, generation after generation? All the Blacks? That's your gratitude? Do you want to die a traitor to your blood and your line? Not die—perish. That's what such people deserve." He straightened. "Severus. Harry. We have nothing more to do here."
Kreacher gave one final twitch in his fist and went limp.
Throughout the tirade, Lady Black had tried to hex Hagrid several times, so he turned to her, simply took the wand from her hand, loomed over her, and hissed:
"Are you completely stupid, or is this a choice? Did you sleep through the unit on giants in school? Magic does not work on us. Does. Not. Work. You—" he spat in disgust. "And your brave, pure, selfless boy can rot in that lake, of course. And after all that, someone still thinks she deserves to call herself a Black? You are—carrion. May a hippogriff have your liver."
Lady Black was opening and closing her mouth like a fish. Then she started going scarlet again.
"SEVERUS!"
***
"Let me die." Walburga's voice was completely hollow. "Or kill me. Your Harry"—her voice broke—"will inherit everything here. I'm sure he'll share with you."
"Right, and I'll go rescue Sirius as his closest living relative, shall I?" Hagrid offered, in a tone of tender contempt—experiencing something close to complete déjà vu. Same sofa, same lady, same aftermath, Snape beside her with his wand, and only the sleeping child—a precaution—peacefully snuffling away behind his back instead of careening through dark corridors.
"Sirius is disowned—"
"It seems to me there's someone else here rather more deserving of that. And by a considerable margin."
"Could someone have cursed her?" Severus mused. "Normal people don't behave like—"
"You might be right," Hagrid said. "The Blacks have always had their particular kind of madness, but not suicidal tendencies—that's a different thing entirely. And it keeps happening, conveniently: one off to Azkaban, another to a crypt—almost as if something's pushing them there. She was more or less rational not long ago."
"She needs that porridge," Severus recalled. "The special one."
"You think it'll help?"
"The most effective treatment for a… change of worldview. I would know."
"Persuasion porridge?"
"I don't think it was the rice specifically."
"Well, I can't remember where the milk came from—I just don't!"
"You'll have to figure it out."
They both glanced at Lady Black. She wasn't looking at them, wasn't speaking—just breathing, slowly and heavily. She really was in a bad way.
"Wait," Andrei frowned, catching at a thought until he had it. "Could the Horcrux be doing this to them? When that thing was crawling out of the scar—all kinds of dark thoughts came into my head."
"You told me about Fiendfyre at exactly the right moment," Severus agreed. "I don't know what would have happened otherwise."
"But why didn't it affect us?"
"The porridge."
"Then what are we sitting here for?"
"Are we burning it in the middle of the square?"
"That's—" Andrei gave him a thumbs up. "Is there not an inner courtyard?"
"Do you think I have that kind of command over that particular spell?"
"I think you'd simply prefer to go on living. Especially since we've got a mountain of things still to do."
Hagrid swept the locket from the table into his pocket, and they put the half-insensible Walburga to sleep and wrapped Kreacher firmly—he ended up resembling something caught in a spider's web—and went to find a suitable spot.
They found one quickly, and the whole operation took less than a quarter of an hour. The locket melted. What remained looked rather like a beautiful gold ingot, shaped something like a fist—or, if one were uncharitable, a fig.
"Feel anything?" Andrei asked Severus, but the young man shrugged and suggested testing the results on Kreacher.
"Just don't fully unwrap him," Andrei warned. Snape merely snorted.
The house-elf stared at the golden fig with weeping, wild eyes and went very still. His face began to slowly change.
"The halfblood masters have destroyed the Horcrux!" he cracked on the high note. "Now Kreacher can go back to Master Regulus!!!"
Ropes—what ropes, what magical bindings—Hagrid barely managed to grab the elf by the scruff, Snape got the legs, and suddenly they were in the cave itself, at the very entrance, but then Kreacher swayed, began gasping for air, and collapsed, murmuring something about his master who was supposed to be waiting.
Andrei couldn't make out the words. Snape could—and he was the first to plunge into the cave. They were chilled to the bone before they'd taken ten steps. The lake boiled, but not with water—with bodies. Human, and dead by the look of them for quite some time.
And not far from the shore, on the island—
"Regulus!" Snape called out, his voice strangled. "Hold on!"
A human figure lurched back from the water's edge and slowly sank down.
"There should be a boat," Snape said. "If the house-elf couldn't bring him to the island directly—"
"He couldn't bring me either," Hagrid rumbled, and looked thoughtfully down at his own legs. Then shrugged and walked toward the island, hoping his height would be enough. The lake turned out to be shallow enough.
The Inferi came in a solid wave—but then Snape lost his composure. Fire support helped: the dead fell back. And then Hagrid was wading back with an unconscious Regulus in his arms.
They had to run. The lake was beginning to act in concert with its Inferi, as though the water itself wanted to engulf them, to pull the warmth from them. The flying spray burned with cold, seizing their limbs, and it was only when they burst into daylight that they could simply breathe. But they couldn't stop—from the depths of the cave came a sound like an enormous wave building.
"Completely unsanitary—that'll need dealing with," Andrei forced out a dry laugh, setting his burden down on the rocks, which felt almost warm by comparison. Snape was already raising his wand:
"Adesc—"
"Wait—Bombarda!" Two massive boulders crashed across the passage.
"Into the crack!" Andrei threw himself at the nearest fissure, Snape doing the same from the other side.
"Adesco Fire!"
They fell back and brought the entrance down a second time. Hagrid grabbed Regulus and Kreacher and jumped back as far as he could as a stream of molten lava poured from the cave like a living volcano. They had to cast Finite repeatedly before things finally settled, and even then the tension didn't release them for a long while.
"Well then," Hagrid exhaled with deep satisfaction, turning to Snape—and his expression immediately changed. "Severus! Severus!"
Snape was still sitting exactly where he'd been, unresponsive to anything, his skin gradually taking on the same bluish hue as Regulus Black lying between them.
Poisoned, Andrei thought, and his mind went blank. What do I do? How do I—
He jumped up, seized Snape by the hands, but the young man didn't even blink, staring at nothing with the fixed, empty eyes of a dead man.
I will not lose him. He heard his own teeth grind—the sound rang sharp in his ears—and it steadied him slightly.
He came within a breath of Apparating straight to Hogwarts to find the Headmaster's bird, and at that moment he genuinely didn't care what happened afterward. But that wasn't right. First— He reached toward Severus's neck, his fingers trembling oddly, but he found the artery quickly. Thud. Thud. Thud. Slow. But steady. There—and there—the chest rose, barely perceptibly, but it rose under his other palm. Alive.
He looked at Black. The same almost imperceptible rise and fall. If the boy had survived days in that cave, then Snape could survive too. He had to.
Andrei put his face in his hands and forced himself to concentrate. He thought about that door—the one that had given them such trouble. The image kept blurring, like a heat shimmer, but slowly, slowly, he made it come clear.
And then he found himself waving the pink umbrella and urgently talking to Snape and Black—telling them to hold on, they had to hold on, because people were waiting, because Harry would wake up soon and there was no knowing what he and the ferocious, half-mad Gran Walburga would get up to without supervision, so they needed to pull themselves together and get to Grimmauld, Grimmauld Place twelve, they needed to hurry before anyone woke up, they needed to— come home, Regulus, come home, it's over, it's all over—
***
As Andrei had feared, Harry woke first. Found no one, saw only the sleeping lady, and naturally set off toward her.
Walburga was surfacing as if from non-existence. Well—she had had two brushes with a stroke in one day. But she felt the small hands on her face. And went very still, not trusting herself. It couldn't be. Her firstborn had loved to play with her hair—her little Sirius, her favourite, her beautiful, gifted boy. Her throat tightened, and she opened her eyes.
Not a dream. Not Sirius either, but his little godson. The child regarded her with some severity, and she became aware of a smell that required immediate attention.
"Kreacher!" she rasped.
The house-elf did not come. Did not come to a direct order to attend to Harry either.
She had to manage herself. The magic came sluggishly, as though she were pushing through deep water—her ears rang, her head felt stuffed with cotton wool—but the child's presence was spreading warmth through her that she had not felt in a very long time.
While the little one was here, she would manage.
The porridge burned slightly—the lady had not cooked in several decades, not since she had finished school, where they had taught her all the domestic arts she had barely tolerated. But she couldn't get Harry to sit down and eat.
"Mama!" the little boy announced, in a tone that brooked no argument, and set off down the corridor.
He began opening doors one by one, calling for mama at each one. Walburga understood perfectly well who he was looking for. But she couldn't distract him, couldn't influence him in any way.
They've gone for Reg, she thought. For Regulus's body, she corrected herself, and her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to howl—there was no one to see her, and the little one wouldn't tell—but only two wet lines ran down her cheeks.
Harry planted himself on the top step of the stairs, right where she had first seen the uninvited guests, and there was nothing for it but to settle beside him—if only to make sure the child didn't fall. She tried to distract him with the Ifrit, but the little boy didn't even look at it. He squirmed out of her arms with absolute determination, and of course got what he wanted.
Debt. She had a debt of life and a debt of death to this— Hagrid. This thought had been enormously irritating to her before. Acknowledging such a debt to a wizard—even a halfblood—would have been far simpler. But Hagrid. A shudder went through her every time she heard his voice. And yet now all of that seemed somehow very distant, very strange—as though the outrage were slowly loosening, its fury draining away, leaving only a vague annoyance, partly directed at herself. No. Ladies of quality did not behave as she had.
Harry appears to be planning to sit on this step for the rest of his natural life, she thought, as the child ignored yet another attempt. He wanted neither food nor play nor, apparently, any movement whatsoever. Yes—it would simply not be easy without them. She understood that now. And called for her old servant one last time.
The house shuddered when something inside it came crashing down. In the entrance hall the troll's leg gave way along with the old umbrellas. Harry launched himself downstairs with a triumphant yell, tripped, and flew—she went after him—and they landed together in a heap of four bodies, not softly at all. Walburga met nothing but bones. But when she stood—she gasped.
The only one who bore any resemblance to the living was the half-giant, who was clutching like an enormous bouquet: a small pink umbrella, the body of her son, the body of Snape, and an insensible Kreacher. Hagrid exhaled, closed his eyes, and collapsed sideways, no longer responding to anything at all.
Two dead men, thought Walburga, dropped to her knees beside her son and touched his face—and then her hand felt a faint movement of air.
He was breathing. Her Reg was alive.
In all its long history, the house at Grimmauld Place had probably never heard a cry like that…